SUGGESTIVENESS 213 



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 Camphell 

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

 worth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and 

 Euskin 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 

 of the eighteenth, probably because this term has 

 been recently added to our psychology. 



As a rule it may be said that the more a writer 

 condenses, the more suggestive his work will be. 

 There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between 

 the force expended in compacting a sentence and the 

 force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader's 

 mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a sugges- 

 tive one. Poetry is, or should be, more suggestive 

 than prose, because it is the result of a more com- 

 pendious and sublimating process. The mind of the 

 poet is more tense, he uses language under greater 

 pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose 

 medium of expression gives his mind more play- 

 room. The poet often succeeds in focusing his mean- 

 ing or emotion in a single epithet, and he alone 

 gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There 

 are pregnant sentences in all the grfeat prose writers ; 

 there are immortal lines only in the poets. 



Whitman said the word he would himself use as 



