Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.”
The final couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he says of it, “In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in themselves, but depend for their “high quality” upon their association with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am strangely deluded, my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are composed, and how artlessly they are put together! Nine every-day words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, following each other in the most unstudied manner—and the result perfection!
By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from Shakespeare:—
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose order, and not over-musical,—“such stuff” and “little life” being almost cacophonous,—have a magical force, if I may presume for once to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of literature. We hear them, if we do hear them, and all things earthly seem to melt and vanish.
Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition, and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the words, “Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly affected, politics and government are gone, an “insubstantial pageant faded.” “All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself, and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the pamphlet, I care not to read further; like Emerson at the play, who had ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost:—