“What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?”
I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that exalted title,—among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date, having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen: “Le bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in the midst of “Hamlet,” as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s, who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read Milton’s description of Satan—
“Nor appeared
Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess
Of glory obscured”—
till he felt “a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of beauty and grandeur.”
One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality: it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is commonly estimated. It is musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,—so completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either present or absent.[11] The appeal is to the imagination, not to the ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There is no enchantment in a riddle.
Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any conceit or play upon words.