his approach to any work of art, therefore, the layman is
confronted first of all with the problem of the language which the
work employs. Architecture uses as its language the structural
capabilities of its material, as wood or stone, bringing all together
into coherent and serviceable form. Poetry is phrased in words.
Painting employs as its medium color and line and mass. At the
outset, in the case of any art, we have some knowledge of the
signification of its terms. Here is a painting of a sower. Out of
previous experience of the world we easily recognize the subject of
the picture. But whence comes the majesty of this rude peasant, the
dignity august of this rough and toil-burdened laborer, his power to
move us? In addition to the common signification of its terms, then,
language seems to have a further expressiveness, a new meaning
imparted to it by the way in which the artist uses it. In a poem we
know the meaning of the words, but the _poetry_ of it, which we
feel rather than know, is the creation of the poet, wrought out of the
familiar words by his cunning manipulation of them.

"The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud, thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

A drama in twelve lines. These are words of common daily usage,
every one,--for the most part aggressively so. But the romance
which they effuse, the glamour which envelops the commonplace
incident as with an aura, is due to the poet's strategic selection of his
terms, the one right word out of many words that offered, and his
subtle combination of his terms into melody and rhythm. The
wonder of the poet's craft is like the musician's,--

"That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a
star."

A building rises before us; we recognize it as a building, and again
easily we infer the purpose which it serves, that it is a temple or a
dwelling. And then the beauty of it, a power to affect us beyond the
mere feet that it is a building, lays hold upon us, an influen