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.

And Theos Alwyn was essentially, and above all things, faithful to the lofty purpose of his calling,—­he dealt with his art reverently, and not in rough haste and scrambling carelessness,—­ if he worked out any idea in rhyme, the idea was distinct and the rhyme was perfect,—­he was not content, like Browning, to jumble together such hideous and ludicrous combinations as “high;—­ Humph!” and “triumph,”—­moreover, he knew that what he had to tell his public must be told comprehensively, yet grandly, with all the authority and persuasiveness of incisive rhetoric, yet also with all the sweetness and fascination of a passioned love-song.  Occupied with such work as this, London, with its myriad mad noises and vulgar distractions, became impossible to him,—­and Villiers, his fidus Achates, who had read portions of his great poem and was impatient to see it finished, knowing, as he did, what an enormous sensation it would create when published, warmly seconded his own desire to gain a couple of months complete seclusion and tranquillity.