And it is not merely a dry lexicon that he compiles,--a thing which
enables us to translate from one dead dialect into another as dead,--but
all his verse is instinct with music, and his words open windows on
every side to pictures of scenery and life. The difference between the
dry fact and the poem is as great as that between reading the shipping
news and seeing the actual coming and going of the crowd of stately
ships,--"the city on the inconstant billows dancing,"--as there is
between ten minutes of happiness and ten minutes by the clock. Everybody
remembers the story of the little Montague who was stolen and sold to
the chimney-sweep: how he could dimly remember lying in a beautiful
chamber; how he carried with him in all his drudgery the vision of a
fair, sad mother's face that sought him everywhere in vain; how he threw
himself one day, all sooty as he was from his toil, on a rich bed and
fell asleep, and how a kind person woke him, questioned him, pieced
together his broken recollections for him, and so at last made the
visions of the beautiful chamber and the fair, sad countenance real to
him again. It seems to me that the offices that the poet does for us are
typified in this nursery-tale. We all of us have our vague reminiscences
of the stately home of our childhood,--for we are all of us poets and
geniuses in our youth, while earth is all new to us, and the chalice of
every buttercup is brimming with the wine of poesy,--and we all remember
the beautiful, motherly countenance which nature bent over us there.
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