inadmissible in prose. And not only in the frequency, but in what
is termed the violence of the inversions, will this distinction be
remarked. In the abundant use of figures, again, we may recognize
the same truth. Metaphors, similes, hyperboles, and personifications,
are the poet's colours, which he has liberty to employ almost without
limit. We characterize as "poetical" the prose which uses these
appliances of language with any frequency, and condemn it as "over
florid" or "affected" long before they occur with the profusion
allowed in verse. Further, let it be remarked that in brevity--the
other requisite of forcible expression which theory points out,
and emotion spontaneously fulfils--poetical phraseology similarly
differs from ordinary phraseology. Imperfect periods are frequent;
elisions are perpetual; and many of the minor words, which would
be deemed essential in prose, are dispensed with.

53. Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially
impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech,
and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances
of excitement. While the matter embodied is idealized emotion,
the vehicle is the idealized language of emotion. As the musical
composer catches the cadences in which our feelings of joy and
sympathy, grief and despair, vent themselves, and out of these
germs evolves melodies suggesting higher phases of these feelings;
I so, the poet develops from the typical expressions in which men
utter passion and sentiment, those choice forms of verbal combination
in which concentrated passion and sentiment may be fitly presented.

54. There is one peculiarity of poetry conducing much
to its effect--the peculiarity which is indeed usually thought its
characteristic one--still remaining to be considered: we mean its