ensely by the infusion, in richness of synonyme
and in the power of expressing nice shades of thought and feeling, but
more than all in light-footed polysyllables that trip singing to the
music of verse. There are certain cases, it is true, where the vulgar
Saxon word is refined, and the refined Latin vulgar, in poetry,--as in
_sweat_ and _perspiration_; but there are vastly more in which the
Latin bears the bell. Perhaps there might be a question between the old
English _again-rising_ and _resurrection_; but there can be no doubt
that _conscience_ is better than _inwit_, and _remorse_ than
_again-bite_. Should we translate the title of Wordsworth's famous ode,
"Intimations of Immortality," into "Hints of Deathlessness," it would
hiss like an angry gander. If, instead of Shakspeare's

"Age cannot wither her,
Nor custom stale her infinite variety,"

we should say, "her boundless manifoldness," the sentiment would suffer
in exact proportion with the music. What homebred English could ape the
high Roman fashion of such togated words as

"The multitudinous sea incarnadine,"--

where the huddling epithet implies the tempest-tossed soul of the
speaker, and at the same time pictures the wallowing waste of ocean
more vividly than the famous phrase of AEschylus does its rippling
sunshine? Again, _sailor_ is less poetical than _mariner_, as Campbell
felt, when he wrote,

"Ye mariners of England,"

and Coleridge, when he preferred

"It was an ancient mariner"

to

"It was an elderly seaman";

for it is as much the charm of poetry that it suggest a certain
remoteness and strangeness as familiarity; and it is essential not only
that we feel at once the meaning of the words in themselves, but also
their melodic meaning in relation to each other, and to the sympathetic
variety of the verse. A word once vulgarized can never be
rehabilitated. We might say now a _buxom_ lass, or that a chambermaid
was _buxom_, but we could not use the term, as Milton did, in its
original sense of _bowsome_,--that is, _lithe, gracefully bending_.[8]

But the secret of force in writing lies not in the pedigree of nouns
and adjectives and verbs, but in having something that you believe in
to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it. It is
when expression becomes an act of memory, instead of an unconscious
necessity, that diction takes the place of warm and hearty speech. It
is not safe to attribute