And seen them in a round:
Each virgin like a spring,
With honeysuckles crown'd.
But now we see none here
Whose silvery feet did tread,
And with dishevell'd hair
Adorn'd this smoother mead.
Like unthrifts, having spent
Your stock and needy grown,
You've left here to lament
Your poor estates, alone,

is inferior, in specifically poetic quality, to

Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more,
For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor;
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.

We come, then, to the consideration of this specific quality that
distinguishes what we recognise as poetry from all other verbal expression.
Returning for a moment to _Paradise Lost_, we find that here is a work
of art of which the visible and external sign is words. That it has three
qualities--there may be more, but it is not to the point--architectural
power, moral exaltation and a sense of character, each of which, although
it may be more impressive when presented as it were under the auspices of
the poetic quality, can exist independently of it, as in _Tom Jones_,