Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/270

240 What I may call the constant, the habitual, imagination Imaginative diction. of a true poet is shown by his instinct for words,—those keys which all may clatter, and which yield their music to so few. He finds the inevitable word or phrase, unfound before, and it becomes classical in a moment. The power of words and the gift of their selection are unconrprehended by writers who have all trite and hackneyed phrases at the pen's end. The imagination begets original diction, suggestive epithets, verbs implying extended scenes and events, phrases which are a delight and which, as we say, speak volumes, single notes which establish the dominant tone.

This kind of felicity makes an excerpt from "The best words in their best order." Shakespeare unmistakable. Milton's diction rivals that of Æschylus, though nothing can outrank the Grecian's ,—the innumerous laughter of his ocean waves. But recall Milton's "wandering moon" (borrowed, haply, from the Latin), and his "wilderness of sweets;" and such phrases as "dim, religious light," "fatal and perfidious bark," "hide their diminished heads," "the least-erected spirit that fell," "barbaric pearl and gold," "imparadised in one another's arms," "rose like an exhalation," "such sweet compulsion doth in music lie;" and his fancies of the daisies' "quaint enamelled eyes," and of "dancing in the checkered shade;" and numberless similar beauties that we term Miltonic.