What was of greater import, no arbitrary line
had been drawn between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what
was common; poetry had not been aliened from the people by the
establishment of an Upper House of vocables, alone entitled to move in
the stately ceremonials of verse, and privileged from arrest while they
forever keep the promise of meaning to the ear and break it to the sense.
The hot conception of the poet had no time to cool while he was debating
the comparative respectability of this phrase or that; but he snatched
what word his instinct prompted, and saw no indiscretion in making a king
speak as his country nurse might have taught him.[120] It was Waller who
first learned in France that to talk in rhyme alone comported with the
state of royalty. In the time of Shakespeare, the living tongue resembled
that tree which Father Huc saw in Tartary, whose leaves were
languaged,--and every hidden root of thought, every subtilest fibre of
feeling, was mated by new shoots and leafage of expression, fed from
those unseen sources in the common earth of human nature.
The Cabalists had a notion, that whoever found out the mystic word for
anything attained to absolute mastery over that thing. The reverse of
this is certainly true of poetic expression; for he who is thoroughly
possessed of his thought, who imaginatively conceives an idea or image,
becomes master of the word that shall most amply and fitly utter it.
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