SUGGESTIVENESS 109 



unexpected richness of meaning, as when Coleridge 

 speaks of those books that " find " us ; or Shake- 

 speare of the " marriage of true minds," or Whitman 

 of the autumn apple hanging "indolent-ripe" on 

 the tree. Probably that language is the most sug- 

 gestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most 

 largely from the experience of life, that savors of 

 real things. The Saxon English of Walton or Bar- 

 row is more suggestive than the latinized English of 

 Johnson or Gibbon. 



Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite 

 exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is 

 much more abundant in the writers of the seven- 

 teenth century. It goes much more with the vernacu- 

 lar style, the homely style, than with the polished 

 academic style. 



With the stream of English literature of the nine- 

 teenth century has mingled a current of German 

 thought and mysticism, and this has greatly height- 

 ened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and 

 in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell 

 or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Words- 

 worth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and 

 Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and 

 Emerson and Whitman, a depth and richness of 

 spiritual and emotional background that the wits of 

 Pope's and Johnson's times knew not of. It seems 

 as if the subconscious self played a much greater 

 part in the literature of the nineteenth century than 



