The Form and the Spirit 279of the field and mountain self-sown on the banks or near the
sources are replaced by the blossoms of a careful culture. Still
however reined in or penetrated and rendered grave by thought,
the life of feeling is still there and the power and sincerity of
the lyrical impulse abide as the base of the workings of the
moved intelligence. But in the literary ages that are classical
by imitation, there is ordinarily a great poverty, an absence or
thinness of the lyrical element, the sincerity and confident self-
pleasure of the feeling indispensable to the lyrical movement
wither under the coldly observant and too scrutinising eye of
the reflective reason, and the revival of song has to await the
romantic movement of interest of a more eager and a wider
intelligence which will endeavour to get back to some joy of the
intimate powers of life and the vivid lyricism of the heart and
the imagination. There is then a return by an imaginative effort
to old cultivated forms of lyrical expression and to early simple
movements like the ballad motive and in the end a great variety
of experiments in new metrical moulds and subtle modifications
of old structures, an attempt of the idea to turn back the thought
mind to grave or happy sincerities of emotion or impose on it a
more absolute assent to bare simplicities of thought and feeling
and finally a living curiosity of the intelligence in the expression
of all kinds and shades of sensation and emotion. The work of
this developed poetic intellectuality differs from the early work
whose spirit and manner it often tries hard to recover because
it is the thought that is primarily at work and the form less a
spontaneous creation of the soul than a deliberately intelligent
structure, and while the movement of the pure lyrical impulse is
entirely shaped by the feeling and the thought only accompanies
it in its steps, here the thought actively intervenes and determines
and cannot but sophisticate the emotional movement. This dis-
tinction has many consequences and most this pregnant result
that even the simplicities of a developed poetical thought are
willed simplicities and the end is a curiosity of work that has
many triumphs of aesthetic satisfaction but not often any longer
the native tones of the soul when the pure lyrical feeling was still
possible.