Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
And again:
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.
There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer
instinct for the precious word than he had. Byron had none of this
magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his
spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the
energy of his thought. Tennyson was much more of the artificer in
words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats. Compare the use of adjectives in
two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the
Nightingale," and the difference is startling. Both are incomparable,
but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture
that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its
jewelled word. "_Embalmed_ darkness," "_Verdurous_ glooms," "Now more
than ever seems it _rich_ to die." "Cooled a long age in the
_deep-delved_ earth." "_Darkling_ I listen." "She stood in tears amid
the _alien_ corn." "Oh, for a beaker full of the _warm south_." "With
beaded bubbles _winking_ at the brim." "No _hungry_ generations tread
thee down." And so on. Such a casket of jewels can be found in no
other poet that has used our tongue. If Keats's vocabulary had a
defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like
the touch of his hand, spoke of death. It lacked the fresh, happy,
sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.
Word-magic belongs to poetry. In prose it is an intrusion. That was
the view of Coleridge. It was because, among its other qualities,
Southey's writing was so free from the shock of the dazzling word that
Coleridge held it to be the perfect example of pure prose. The
modulations are so just, the note so unaffected, the current so clear
and untroubled that you read on without pausing once to think "What a
brilliant writer this fellow is." And that is the true triumph of the
art. It is an art which addresses itself to the mind, and not the
emotions, and word-magic does not belong to its essential armoury.