’O then if in my lagging lines you miss
  The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....’

There is his ‘avant toute chose.’  Perhaps it seems very like ’de la musique.’  But it tells us more about Hopkins’s music than Verlaine’s line told us about his.  This music is of a particular kind, not the ‘sanglots du violon,’ but pre-eminently the music of song, the music most proper to lyrical verse.  If one were to seek in English the lyrical poem to which Hopkins’s definition could be most fittingly applied, one would find Shelley’s ‘Skylark.’  A technical progression onwards from the ‘Skylark’ is accordingly the main line of Hopkins’s poetical evolution.  There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.  Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered, appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his contemporary.  There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo in ‘whorled ear’ and ‘lark-charmed’; there is an aspiration after Milton’s architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the most lucid of the fragments,’Epithalamion.’  But the central point of departure is the ‘Skylark.’  The ‘May Magnificat’ is evidence of Hopkins’s achievement in the direct line:—­

  ’Ask of her, the mighty mother: 
  Her reply puts this other
  Question:  What is Spring?—­
  Growth in everything—­

  Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
  Grass and greenworld all together;
  Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
  Throstle above her nested
  Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
  Forms and warms the life within....

...  When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple Bloom lights the orchard-apple, And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surfed cherry,

  And azuring-over graybell makes
  Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
  And magic cuckoo-call
  Caps, clears, and clinches all....’

That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms.  But a melody so simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in sound, did not satisfy Hopkins.  He aimed at complex internal harmonies, at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an expressive word of his own:—­

    ’But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and
    design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of
    calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry.’