LUCID LTTEEATUEB 181 



flight and drops." How can one adjust his mind to 

 the notion of a bird drinking its own flight ? 

 Or take this puzzle : — 



"Vermilion wings, by distance held 

 To pause aflight while fleeting swift, 

 And high aloft the pearl inshelled 

 Her lucid glow in glow will lift." 



Does not the reading of such lines set one's head 

 in a whirl ? 



The impression of novelty can never be made by 

 a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of 

 mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils 

 and screens and dim lights may do it in the world 

 of sense, hut not in the world of ideas. The reader 

 feels all the time that there is something in the 

 way, and that he would see clearly if the writer 

 thought clearly. Preshness and novelty are the 

 gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has 

 lively and novel emotions in the presence of every- 

 day things and events. 



There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry 

 of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own 

 Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the 

 Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at 

 once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth's " Ode 

 to Immortality," or Tennyson's " Tiresias " or " An- 

 cient Sage," or Emerson's "Brahma," or Whit- 

 man's " Sleep Chasings," but how transparent the 

 language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct 

 and solid the expression ! There is a vast difference 

 between the impression or want of impression 



