ran clear into poetry without the need of a refining process.  They say that Caedmon was a cow-keeper:  but the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and Wordsworth himself, in his boldest flights of theory, was forced to allow of selection.  Even by selection from among the chaos of implements that are in daily use around him, a poet can barely equip himself with a choice of words sufficient for his needs; he must have recourse to his predecessors; and so it comes about that the poetry of the modern world is a store-house of obsolete diction.  The most surprising characteristic of the right poetic diction, whether it draw its vocabulary from near at hand, or avail itself of the far-fetched inheritance preserved by the poets, is its matchless sincerity.  Something of extravagance there may be in those brilliant clusters of romantic words that are everywhere found in the work of Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Keats, but they are the natural leafage and fruitage of a luxuriant imagination, which, lacking these, could not attain to its full height.  Only by the energy of the arts can a voice be given to the subtleties and raptures of emotional experience; ordinary social intercourse affords neither opportunity nor means for this fervour of self-revelation.  And if the highest reach of poetry is often to be found in the use of common colloquialisms, charged with the intensity of restrained passion, this is not due to a greater sincerity of expression, but to the strength derived from dramatic situation.  Where speech spends itself on its subject, drama stands idle; but where the dramatic stress is at its greatest, three or four words may enshrine all the passion of the moment.  Romeo’s apostrophe from under the balcony —

O, speak again, bright Angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond’ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air —

though it breathe the soul of romance, must yield, for sheer effect, to his later soliloquy, spoken when the news of Juliet’s death is brought to him,

Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.

And even the constellated glories of Paradise Lost are less moving than the plain words wherein Samson forecasts his approaching end —

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.

Here are simple words raised to a higher power and animated with a purer intention than they carry in ordinary life.  It is this unfailing note of sincerity, eloquent or laconic, that has made poetry the teacher of prose.  Phrases which, to all seeming, might have been hit on by the first comer, are often cut away from their poetical context and robbed of their musical value that they may be transferred to the service of prose.  They bring with them, down to the valley, a wafted sense of some region of higher thought and purer feeling.  They bear, perhaps, no marks of curious diction to know them by.  Whence comes the irresistible pathos of the lines —