Do these verses draw their power from a skilful arrangement of vowel and consonant?  But they are quoted from a translation, and can be translated otherwise, well or ill or indifferently, without losing more than a little of their virtue.  Do they impress the eye by opening before it a prospect of vast extent, peopled by vague shapes?  On the contrary, the visual embodiment of the ideas suggested kills the sense of the passage, by lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the measure of a poplar-tree.  Death and life, height and depth, are conceived by the apostle, and creation thrown in like a trinket, only that they may lend emphasis to the denial that is the soul of his purpose.  Other arts can affirm, or seem to affirm, with all due wealth of circumstance and detail; they can heighten their affirmation by the modesty of reserve, the surprises of a studied brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence; literature alone can deny, and honour the denial with the last resources of a power that has the universe for its treasury.  It is this negative capability of words, their privative force, whereby they can impress the minds with a sense of “vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence,” that Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger days.  In such a phrase as “the angel of the Lord” language mocks the positive rivalry of the pictorial art, which can offer only the poor pretence of an equivalent in a young man painted with wings.  But the difference between the two arts is even better marked in the matter of negative suggestion; it is instanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describes the descent of AEneas and the Sibyl to the shades of the nether world.  Here are amassed all “the images of a tremendous dignity” that the poet could forge from the sublime of denial.  The two most famous lines are a procession of negatives:-

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day,
And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway,
Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path,
Darkling they took their solitary way.

Here is the secret of some of the cardinal effects of literature; strong epithets like “lonely,” “supreme,” “invisible,” “eternal,” “inexorable,” with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the vastness of what they deny.  And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework.  Such words as “ominous,” “fantastic,” “attenuated,” “bewildered,” “justification,” are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity.  It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, “heated originally by the breath of others,” that a poet’s fine sense and knowledge most avail him.  The company a word has kept, its history, faculties,