294 The Future Poetry
She was a phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight,
A lovely apparition sent
To be a moment’s ornament.And supreme examples within the limits of this power which will
bring out all their difference from the more common texture of
poetry, may be taken from the same poets, — Shelley’s
The silent moon
In her interlunar swoon,and Wordsworth’s
They flash upon the inner eye
Which is the bliss of solitude.Here we get the pure illuminative speech of poetry not mixed
with or arising out of the lucid adequate or the richly or force-
fully effective or dynamic manner, but changed into an altogether
supra-intellectual light of intuitive substance and vision and
utterance.
The difference here we find to be an increasing intensity
and finally a concentrated purity and fullness of the substance
and language of intuitive expression. In the less intense styles
the thing conveyed is indeed something suggested to and by
the intuitive mind, — only the least inspired poetry is purely
intellectual in substance, — but it is expressed with a certain
indirectness or else with a dilution of the body of the intuitive
light, and this is due to an intellectualised language or to the
speech of an imagination which tries to bridge the gulf between
the intuitive mind and the normal intelligence. The two pow-
ers seem to lean on and support each other, at a certain point
are brought very close and even up to the point of fusion, and
then suddenly the border is crossed, the difficulty of getting out
through the doors of the mind the pure untranslated language
of intuitive vision overcome and we have a word of intense light
in which the intellect and its imagination count for nothing and
the mind’s language, even while remaining in material the same,