g depth and breadth
of emotional capacity, have not, whatever their other gifts, the soil
needed for highly imaginative poetry. With broad emphasis this
aesthetic law is exemplified in the verse of Voltaire, especially in
his dramas, and in the verse of one who was deeper and higher than he
as thinker and critic, of Lessing. Skillful versifiers, by help of
fancy and a certain plastic aptitude and laborious culture, are
enabled to give to smooth verse a flavor of poetry and to achieve a
temporary reputation. But of such uninspired workmanship the gilding
after a while wears off, the externally imparted perfume surely
evaporates.

Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest
parts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deep
the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest
utterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,--like the
sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling
canopy of storm,--Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the
words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness
and what sweep of power in three lines!

"O heavens,
If you do love old men, if your sweet sway
Allow obedience, if yourselves are old,
Make it your cause; send down and take my part!"

The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the
sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light
it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty,
one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation.
In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men
that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite
stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words
what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth day
one of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet,
crying,--

"Father, why dost not help me?"

Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through
poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony,
as in this case and the tragic drama, that the sensibilities are
"purged," according to the famous saying of Aristotle; but it is
because such scenes are witnessed by the light of the beautiful. The
beautiful always purifies and exalts.

In either of these two passages any piling up of words, any hyperbole
of phrase, or bold