s sucking life from her
breast. Translate passion into sensible prose and it becomes absurd,
because subdued to workaday associations, to that level of common sense
and convention where to betray intense feeling is ridiculous and
unmannerly. Shall I ask Shakespeare to translate me his love "still
climbing trees in the Hesperides"? Shall I ask Marlowe how Helen could
"make him immortal with a kiss," or how, in the name of all the Monsieur
Jourdains, at once her face could "launch a thousand ships and burn the
topless towers of Ilion"? Could Aeschylus, if put upon the stand, defend
his making Prometheus cry out,

O divine ether and swift-winged winds,
Ye springs of rivers, and of ocean waves
The innumerable smile, all mother Earth,
And Helios' all-beholding round, I call:
Behold what I, a god, from gods endure!

Or could Lear justify his

I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdoms, call'd you children!

No; precisely what makes the charm of poetry is what we cannot explain
any more than we can describe a perfume. There is a little quatrain of
Gongora's quoted by Calderon in his "Alcalde of Zalamea" which has an
inexplicable charm for me:

Las flores del romero,
Nina Isabel,
Hoy son flores azules,
Y manana seran miel.

If I translate it, 't is nonsense, yet I understand it perfectly, and it
will, I dare say, outlive much wiser things in my memory. It is the very
function of poetry to free us from that witch's circle of common sense
which holds us fast in its narrow enchantment. In this disenthralment,
language and verse have their share, and we may say that language also
is capable of a certain idealization. Here is a passage from the XXXth
song of Drayton's "Poly-Olbion":

Which Copland scarce had spoke, but quickly every Hill
Upon her verge that stands, the neighbouring valleys fill;
Helvillon from his height, it through the mountains threw,
From whom as soon again, the sound Dunbalrase drew,
From whose stone-trophied head, it on to Wendrosse went,
Which tow'rds the sea again, resounded it to Dent,
That Broadwater therewith within her banks astound,
In sailing to the sea, told it in Egremound.

This gave a hint to Wordsworth, who, in one of his "Poems on the Naming
of Places," thus prolongs the echo of it:

Joanna, looking in my eyes, beheld
That ravishment of mine, and laughed aloud.
The Rock, like something starting from a sle