rtain theories. He speaks in one place
of

A soft compulsion on terrene
By heavenly,

which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In
another place he speaks of

The posts that named the swallowed mile,

which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference,
liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and
'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two
lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems
and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory:

Life, the small self-dragon ramped,
Thrill for service to be stamped.

Here every word is harsh, prickly, hard of sense; the rhymes come like
buffets in the face. It is possible that Meredith has more or less
consciously imitated the French practice in the matter of rhymes, for in
France rarity of rhyme is sought as eagerly as in England it is avoided.
Rhyme in French poetry is an important part of the art of verse; in
English poetry, except to some extent at the time of Pope, it has been
accepted as a thing rather to be disguised than accentuated. There is
something a little barbarous in rhyme itself, with its mnemonic click
of emphasis, and the skill of the most skilful English poets has always
been shown in the softening of that click, in reducing it to the
inarticulate answer of an echo. Meredith hammers out his rhymes on the
anvil on which he has forged his clanging and rigid-jointed words. His
verse moves in plate-armour, 'terrible as an army with banners.'

To Meredith poetry has come to be a kind of imaginative logic, and
almost the whole of his later work is a reasoning in verse. He reasons,
not always clearly to the eye, and never satisfyingly to the ear, but
with a fiery intelligence which has more passion than most other poets
put into frankly emotional verse. He reasons in pictures, every line
having its imagery, and he uses pictorial words to express abstract
ideas. Disdaining the common subjects of poetry, as he disdains common
rhythms, common rhymes, and common language, he does much by his
enormous vitality to give human warmth to arguments concerning humanity.
He does much, though he attempts the impossible. His poetry is always
what Rossetti called 'amusing'; it has, in other words, what Baudelaire
called 'the supreme literary grace, energy'; but with what relief does
one not lay down