His Life and Genius 151 



stem from root, therefore a vital embodiment of 

 thought and feeling in his verse appeals vitally 

 to thought and feeling.* 



Xotable in this respect it is how widely his 

 pregnant verse, full-fraught with thought and 

 feeling, differs from the thin poetic stuff, the mat- 

 terless melodies, in which laboured ingenuities of 

 expression, strained touches of rhetoric, feverish 

 feats of rhythm and alliteration, rehned pretiosi- 

 ties of diction, speak nothing substantial. Con- 

 cocted studiously with writhing strains and pains 

 not to say something which the authors have to 

 say, burdened inwardly to unburden themselves 

 outwardly, but because they torture their minds 

 to say something in singular fashion when they 

 have little or nothing to say, such productions are 

 at best lifeless artifice, not matter to which true 

 " art gave lifeless life,"! garlands of cut flowers 

 with no flow of vital sap in them, the barren work 

 of fanciful invention lacking the pith and pulse of 

 real life. A. man " full of warm blood " who lived 

 a man's life of work in the world, Shakspeare 

 wrote poems and plays imbued with experience 

 as incidents of his life-function, if not by the way, 

 at all events on his way ; thoroughly masculine in 

 every quality of him, his work was male and 

 strong without sign of strain ; they, poets by pro- 



Derm es muss von Herzen gehen 



Was auf Herzen wirken soil.— Goethe. 



t Rape of Lucrece. 



