Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/269

Rh to its spell. But Coleridge's creative mood was as brief as it was enrapturing. From his twenty-sixth to his twenty-eighth year he blazed out like Tycho Brahe's star, then sank his light in metaphysics, exhibiting little thenceforth of worth to literature except a criticism of poets and dramatists that in its way was luminous and constructive.

The poet often conveys a whole picture by a single imaginative touch. A desert scene Suggestiveness. by Gérôme would give us little more than we conceive from Landor's suggestive detail—

This force of suggestion is nevertheless highly effective in painting, as where the shadow of the cross implies the crucifixion, or where the cloud-phantoms seen by Doré's "Wandering Jew" exhibit it; and as when, in the same artist's designs for Don Quixote, we see visions with the mad knight's eyes. Of a kindred nature is the prevision, Prevision. the event forestalled, of a single word or phrase. Leigh Hunt cited the line from Keats' "Isabella," "So the two brothers and their murdered man,"—the victim, then journeying with his future slayers, being already dead in their intention. A striking instance of the swift-flashing imagination is in a stanza from Stoddard's Horatian ode upon the funeral of Lincoln:—