Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/271

Rh After Shakespeare and Milton, Keats stands first in respect of imaginative diction. His appellatives of the Grecian Urn, "Cold pastoral," and "Thou foster-child of silence and slow time," are in evidence. "The music yearning like a god in pain," and

excel even Milton's "forget thyself to marble." What a charm in his "darkling I listen," and his thought of Ruth "in tears amid the alien corn"! Shelley's diction is less sure and eclectic, yet sometimes his expression, like his own skylark, is "an unbodied joy." Byron's imaginative language is more rhetorical, but none will forget his "haunted, holy ground," "Death's prophetic ear," "the quiet of a loving eye" (which is like Wordsworth, and again like Landor's phrase on Milton,—"the Sabbath of his mind"). None would forego "the blue rushing of 'the arrowy Rhone," or "the dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule our spirits from their urns," or such a combination of imagination and feeling as this:—

Coleridge's "myriad-minded Shakespeare" is enough to show his mastery of words. A conjuring quality like that of the voices heard by Kubla Khan,—

lurks in the imaginative lines of our Southern lyrist,