In the two or three weeks that followed his meeting with Heliobas, Alwyn made up his mind to leave London for a while. He was tired and restless,--tired of the routine society more or less imposed upon him,--restless because he had come to a standstill in his work--an invisible barrier, over which his creative fancy was unable to take its usual sweeping flight. He had an idea of seeking some quiet spot among mountains, as far remote as possible from the travelling world of men,--a peaceful place, where, with the majestic silence of Nature all about him, he might plead in lover-like retirement with his refractory Muse, and strive to coax her into a sweeter and more indulgent humor. It was not that thoughts were lacking to him,--what he complained of was the monotony of language and the difficulty of finding new, true, and choice forms of expression.
A great thought leaps into the brain like a lightning flash; there it is, an indescribable mystery, warming the soul and pervading the intellect, but the proper expression of that thought is a matter of the deepest anxiety to the true poet, who, if he be worthy of his vocation, is bound not only to proclaim it to the world CLEARLY, but also clad in such a perfection of wording that it shall chime on men's ears with a musical sound as of purest golden bells. There are very few faultless examples of this felicitous utterance in English or in any literature, so few, indeed, that they could almost all be included in one newspaper column of ordinary print. Keats's exquisite line: "AEea's Isle was wondering at the moon"..
in which the word "wondering" paints a whole landscape of dreamy enchantment, and the couplet in the "Ode to a Nightingale," that speaks with a delicious vagueness of "Magic casements opening on the foam Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,"-are absolutely unique and unrivalled, as is the exquisite alliteration taken from a poet of our own day: "The holy lark, With fire from heaven and sunlight on his wing, Who wakes the world with witcheries of the dark, Renewed in rapture in the reddening air!"
Again from the same: "The chords of the lute are entranced With the weight of the wonder of things"; and "his skyward notes Have drenched the summer with the dews of song! ..."
this last line being certainly one of the most suggestive and beautiful in all poetical literature. Such expressions have the intrinsic quality of COMPLETENESS,--once said, we feel that they can never be said again;--they belong to the centuries, rather than the seasons, and any imitation of them we immediately and instinctively resent as an outrage.