and predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct.  How hardly will poetry consent to employ such words as “congratulation” or “philanthropist,”—­words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves.  How eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word like “control,” which gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association.  All words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the vague, have their offices to perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard words which, like tiresome explanatory persons, say all that they mean.  Only in the focus and centre of man’s knowledge is there place for the hammer-blows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.

The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry.  In Shakespeare’s work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the roots of the universe with the particular fact; tempting the mind to explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away from it, and held by something behind.

It will have blood; they say blood win have blood: 
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.

This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense and thought, keeps the eye travelling along the utmost skyline of speculation, where the heavens are interfused with the earth.  In short, the third and greatest virtue of words is no other than the virtue that belongs to the weapons of thought,—­a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies and pierces behind things to a half-perceived unity of law and essence.  In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking, language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposed on a passive material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the energy of thinking purpose.  The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase, on “mere words” bears witness to the rarity of this serious consummation.  Yet by words the world was shaped out of chaos, by words the Christian religion was established among mankind.  Are these terrific engines fit play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?