92 The Future Poetry
strongly, life took possession of the thought or itself quivered
out into thought-expression. Here on the contrary, even in the
two poems that are avowedly expressions of vital moods, it is
the intellect and its imaginations that are making the mood a
material for reflective brooding; there is no longer here the free
and spontaneous life mood chanting its own sight and emotion
to its own moved delight. In the minor Carolean poets we have
some lingering of the colours of the Elizabethan sunset; some-
thing of the life-sense and quick emotional value are still there
but too thinned and diluted to support any intensity or greatness
of speech or manner, and finally they die away into trivialities
of the intelligence playing insincerely with the movements of the
emotional nature. For the reflective idea already predominates
over sight and intimate emotion; the mind is looking at the thing
felt and is no longer taken up and carried away in the wave of
feeling. Some of this work is mystic in its subject or motive; but
that too, except in some luminous lines or passages, suffers from
the same desiccating influence. The opening of an age of intellect
was not the time when a great mystical poetry could leap into
existence.
This ebb is rapid and the change is soon complete. The
colour has faded, the sweetness has vanished, song has fallen into
a dead hush. For a whole long dry metallic century the lyrical
faculty disappeared from the English tongue. The grandiose epic
chant of Milton breaks what would be otherwise a complete si-
lence of all higher or profounder poetic power; but it is a Milton
who has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his
youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all Pagan
delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness to express only in
fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and
Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had built
out of his beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul. One is
moved to speculate on what we might have had from him if,
instead of writing after the long silence of his poetic genius dur-
ing which he remained absorbed in barren political controversy
until public and private calamities compelled him to go back to
himself and his true power, he had written his master work in a