rustle of silk across a counter stop his pulse because it brings back to his sense the odorous whisper of Parthenissa’s robe?  Is not the beat of the horse’s hoofs as rapid to Angelica pursued as the throbs of her own heart huddling upon one another in terror, while it is slow to Sister Anne, as the pulse that pauses between hope and fear, as she listens on the tower for rescue, and would have the rider “spur, though mounted on the wind”?

Dr. Johnson tells us that that only is good poetry which may be translated into sensible prose.  I greatly doubt whether any very profound emotion can be so rendered.  Man is a metrical animal, and it is not in prose but in nonsense verses that the young mother croons her joy over the new centre of hope and terror that is 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.