To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component sense-elements is therefore vain. Memory, “the warder of the brain,” is a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the appeal of a spoken word or unspoken symbol, an odour or a touch, all that has been garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It is the part of the writer to play upon memory, confusing what belongs to one sense with what belongs to another, extorting images of colour at a word, raising ideas of harmony without breaking the stillness of the air. He can lead on the dance of words till their sinuous movements call forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some adamantine rigidity, time is converted into space, and music begets sculpture. To see for the sake of seeing, to hear for the sake of hearing, are subsidiary exercises of his complex metaphysical art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of a philosophy of letters. Necessary though they be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service to new forms, and made to further purposes not their own.
The power of vision—hardly can a writer, least of all if he be a poet, forego that part of his equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to bring them into clear definition and bright concrete imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as if painting also could deal with them. Every abstract conception, as it passes into the light of the creative imagination, acquires structure and firmness and colour, as flowers do in the light of the sun. Life and Death, Love and Youth, Hope and Time, become persons in poetry, not that they may wear the tawdry habiliments of the studio, but because persons are the objects of the most familiar sympathy and the most intimate knowledge.