Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/155

 Now from yon peak departs the vivid ray, That still at eve its lofty temple knows; From rock and torrent fade the tints away, And all is wrapt in twilight's deep repose: While through the pine-wood gleams the vesper-star, And roves the Alpine gale o'er solitudes afar.

We need not weary any one with more examples—for this verse, conveying no picture and leaving no sound in our ears, is but a normal specimen of a vast family: a specimen of lines that are not fresh with any personal impression, or instinct with any experience; their only source of inspiration an untrained fancy, which, however morally aspiring, is deficient in a sense of beauty.

There is, we need perhaps hardly add, another kind of vagueness, for which, indeed, some different name is wanted. It is the vagueness born of mystery and belonging only to good poets. But far from being due to a want of precision, this vagueness takes up where precision stops, and uses each clear image to suggest visions beyond itself—to awaken that inner sense 'whose dwelling is the light of setting suns'. This kind of indefiniteness is only incompletion: an effort to express the inexpressible. It carries us straight to the centre of things—to the reason why poetry exists.

We have cause to be reminded of this, for poetry—above all, the poetry of Nature—has been as much subject to travesty as religion. The hazy are not the only culprits. What can be worse than the hymnal view of Nature which impregnated the last years of the eighteenth and the first forty years of the nineteenth century? There was a day when poets could not speak of a sunset without reflections upon the shortness of life, or of spring without moralizing upon the soul's future; or of streams and rocks and buttercups and daisies, unless as images of Time and Self-control and 'Simple Pleasures'. When Southey looked at holly-berries, he sat down and wrote a poem on moral courage, and perhaps it needs nothing less than a Wordsworth, who