_Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram_, _Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna_.
Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day, And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway, Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path, Darkling they took their solitary way.
Here is the secret of some of the cardinal effects of literature; strong epithets like “lonely,” “supreme,” “invisible,” “eternal,” “inexorable,” with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such words as “ominous,” “fantastic,” “attenuated,” “bewildered,” “justification,” are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity. It is precisely in his dealings with words like these, “heated originally by the breath of others,” that a poet’s fine sense and knowledge most avail him. The company a word has kept, its history, faculties, and predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct. How hardly will poetry consent to employ such words as “congratulation” or “philanthropist,”—words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word like “control,” which gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association. All words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the vague, have their offices to perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard words which, like tiresome explanatory persons, say all that they mean. Only in the focus and centre of man’s knowledge is there place for the hammer-blows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.
The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry. In Shakespeare’s work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the roots of the universe with the particular fact; tempting the mind to explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away from it, and held by something behind.