SUGGESTIYENESS 209 



tive sonnets in the language, because they so abound 

 in words, images, allusions drawn from real life ; 

 they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon 

 by near-by things, that uses language steeped in the 

 common experience of mankind. The poet drew his 

 material not from the strange and the remote, but, 

 as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of 

 life. Does not that poetry or prose work touch us 

 the most nearly that deals with that with which we 

 are most familiar ? One thing that separates the 

 minor poet from the major is that the thoughts and 

 words of the minor poet are more of the nature of 

 asides, or of the exceptional ; he does not take in the 

 common and universal ; we are not familiar with the 

 points of view that so agitate him; and he has not 

 the power to make them real to us. I read poems 

 every day that provoke the thought, " Well, that is 

 all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that 

 earth, those men or those women," — all is so shad- 

 owy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you enter the 

 world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid 

 ground ; the sky and the earth, and the things in them 

 and upon them, are what you have always known, 

 and not for a moment are you called upon to breathe 

 in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to 

 see the landscape. Dante even makes hell as tan- 

 gible and real as the objects of our senses, if not 

 more so. 



Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power 

 of pregnant, compact sentences, — type thoughts, 

 compendious phrases, — vital distinctions or gen- 



