What homebred English could ape the
high Roman fashion of such togated words as
"The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--
where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the
speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean more
vividly than the famous phrase of Aeschylus does its rippling sunshine?
Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell felt, when
he wrote,
"Ye mariners of England,"
and Coleridge, when he chose
"It was an ancient mariner,"
rather than
"It was an elderly seaman";
for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain
remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only
that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also
their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic
variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.
We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid was _buxom_, but
we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its original sense of
_bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[124]
But the secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of
nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe
in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.
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