It is
when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious
necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It is
not safe to attribute special virtues (as Bosworth, for example, does to
the Saxon) to words of whatever derivation, at least in poetry. Because
Lear's "oak-cleaving thunderbolts," and "the all-dreaded thunder-stone"
in "Cymbeline" are so fine, we would not give up Milton's Virgilian
"fulmined over Greece," where the verb in English conveys at once the
idea of flash and reverberation, but avoids that of riving and
shattering. In the experiments made for casting the great bell for the
Westminster Tower, it was found that the superstition which attributed
the remarkable sweetness and purity of tone in certain old bells to the
larger mixture of silver in their composition had no foundation in fact
It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary metals were balanced
against each other, the perfection of form, and the nice gradations of
thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is precisely so with the
language of poetry. The genius of the poet will tell him what word to use
(else what use in his being poet at all?); and even then, unless the
proportion and form, whether of parts or whole, be all that Art requires
and the most sensitive taste finds satisfaction in, he will have failed
to make what shall vibrate through all its parts with a silvery
unison,--in other words, a poem.
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