he void world,
The wide, gray, lampless, deep unpeopled world!"

The highest attainment then of literary power is the "exquisite
expression of exquisite--that is to say, rarely intense or
subtle--impressions." The language, said Wordsworth, should be the
"incarnation of the thought." The highest gift of the writer is to make
his words and their combinations not clever, not dazzling, not merely
lucid, but to make them, by their meanings, their associations, and
their musical effects, exactly reproduce what he thinks and sees and
feels, just in the special light in which he thinks and sees and feels
it.

This involves, of course, a perpetual struggle between thought and
language. Language is for ever striving to overtake thought and feeling.
Browning indeed may say:--

Perceptions whole, like that he sought
To clothe, reject so pure a work of thought
As language.

But in this we must not acquiesce. Browning himself, indeed, however
immense his range of sympathies, however extraordinary his dramatic
insight, falls far short in the purely literary gift. He is not a master
of language as Shakespeare was or as Tennyson was. Extremist votaries of
Browning are accustomed to say either that he is not obscure at all, or
else that his obscurities are inseparable from the thoughts. We must not
admit this latter plea until we are prepared to call Isaiah and
Shakespeare shallower than Browning.

The transcendent literary artist is always compelling language to
express what it had seemed incapable of expressing. Indeed the "advance
of literature" often means no more than a greater degree of success in
giving recognizable shape to the hitherto vague and elusive, in
communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often, when we
say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or "opens up
new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to express such
thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is not an
inventor, but a revealer.

And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and
music. Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language
cannot express--something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle,
emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must not
aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts; it
can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music is
always advancing, always endeavouring to fu