r to impression at the surface, like a rock
with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him to be moved.
The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once
carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do
before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he
is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and
go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to
a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern),
receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre
of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the
feeling, as it were, from far off.

Dante, in his most intense moods, has entire command of himself, and
can look around calmly, at all moments, for the image or the word that
will best tell what he sees to the upper or lower world. But Keats and
Tennyson, and the poets of the second order, are generally themselves
subdued by the feelings under which they write, or, at least, write as
choosing to be so; and therefore admit certain expressions and modes
of thought which are in some sort diseased or false.

Now so long as we see that the _feeling_ is true, we pardon, or are
even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we
are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley's above quoted,
not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully
describe sorrow. But the moment the mind of the speaker becomes cold,
that moment every such expression becomes untrue, as being for ever
untrue in the external facts. And there is no greater baseness in
literature than the habit of using these metaphorical expressions in
cool blood. An inspired writer, in full impetuosity of passion, may
speak wisely and truly of "raging waves of the sea foaming out their
own shame";[62] but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of
the sea without talking of "raging waves," "remorseless floods,"
"ravenous billows," etc.; and it is one of the signs of the highest
power in a writer to check all such habits of thought, and to keep his
eyes fixed firmly on the _pure fact_, out of which if any feeling
conies to him or his reader, he knows it must be a true one.

To keep to the waves, I forget who it is who represents a man in
despair desiring that his body may be cast into the sea,

_Whose changing mound, and foam that passed away_,
Might moc