e to say it at all. Often Meredith wishes to be
too concise, and squeezes his thoughts together like this:

and the totterer Earth detests,
Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he.

In his desire to cram a separate sentence into every line, he writes
such lines as:

Look I once back, a broken pinion I,

He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and
his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this
phrase:

Ravenous all the line for speed.

An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours'
the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect,
where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only,
to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at
once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is
on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be
unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate
meanings, and to translate as it goes.

Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony
without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon
verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the
swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to
astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical
skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical
skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has
written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud
of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping
as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the
building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the
delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his
poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample
magnificence:

Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes
The house of heaven splendid for the bride;

and can end another stanza thus lumpishly:

With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead,
Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged
Shall on through brave wars waged.

Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in
trying to make it into something wholly different, and these
eccentricities come partly from ce