“I could not love thee, Dear! so much,
Loved I not Honor more,”—
nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness of it, its courtly gracefulness, its manner (one seems to see the bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase), the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks not of itself. If you think of it, the charm has failed.
In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that future day when all things will be past; a suggestion or picture that brings an instant soberness,—reverie, melancholy, what you will,—that is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the Wordsworth couplet first quoted,—
“For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago,”—
or as that of the still more familiar slow-running line from the sonnets of Shakespeare,—
“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”—
a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite.
And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf that separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next lower order. Take such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the first that offers itself for the purpose:—