Enveloping the Earth—
And from the soul itself must there be sent
A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth,
Of all sweet sounds the life and element.
And this re-animation of Nature was possible because the imagination was felt as creative in the full religious sense of the word. It had itself assisted in creating the natural forms which the senses were now contemplating. It had moved upon the face of the waters. For it was “the repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation”—the Word made human.
In tracing the semantic history of important words like these, we must not forget that nine-tenths of the words comprising the vocabulary of a civilized nation are never used by more than about one-tenth of the population; while of the remaining tithe nine-tenths of those who use them are commonly aware of about one-tenth of their meanings. Nevertheless it is just by following those meanings up to the high-water mark which they have reached in a few eager minds that we can observe what may fairly be called changes in the general consciousness. It is true that the new meanings must filter through a graduated hierarchy of imaginative literature, literary journalism, reviews, sermons, journalism, popular novels, advertisements, and cinema captions before what is left of them reaches the general public; but the amount that is left, and the spell which is accordingly exerted on the many, depends on how far they have first been carried by the few.
Thus, to take one example, the extraordinary load of meaning often borne by the word dream, in phrases like dreamland, my dreams, the land of my dreams, ... is no doubt traceable ultimately to the use of this word by the great Romantics. When Shelley wrote:
Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his[79] dreams pass....
and