; it is
always bright and defined in detail. The Great Romantics go to work in
other ways. Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken
suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words
that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that
stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or
desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men. It rouses what a
philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of
the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to
induce which is the property of the highest poetry. You will find
nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster's

"Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young,"

and the answer,

"I think not so: her infelicity
Seemed to have years too many,"

or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors
and despairs, as this from _Macbeth_:

"Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth
The secret'st man of blood."

or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats
or a sonnet by Rossetti. But you will find eloquent and pointed
statements of thoughts and feelings that are common to most of us--the
expression of ordinary human nature--

"What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest,"

"Wit and fine writing" consisting, as Addison put it in a review of
Pope's first published poem, not so much "in advancing things that are
new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable turn."

Though in this largest sense the "classic" writers eschewed the
vagueness of romanticism, in another and more restricted way they
cultivated it. They were not realists as all good romanticists have to
be. They had no love for oddities or idiosyncrasies or exceptions. They
loved uniformity, they had no use for truth in detail. They liked the
broad generalised, descriptive style of Milton, for instance, better
than the closely packed style of Shakespeare, which gets its effects
from a series of minute observations huddled one after the other and
giving the reader, so to speak, the materials for his own impression,
rather than rendering, as does Milton, the expression itself.

Every literary discovery hardens ultimately into a convention; it has
its day and then its work is done, and it has to be destroyed so that
the