Of the poetic value of these latinized words little need be said. Whether or no they reflect a conscious effort to extend, enrich, or renew the vocabulary of English poetry, they cannot be said to have added much to the expressive resources of the language. This is not, of course, merely because they are of direct Latin origin. We know that around the central Teutonic core of English there have slowly been built up two mighty strata of Latin and Romance formations, which, in virtue of their long employment by writers in prose and verse, as well as on the lips of the people, have slowly acquired that force and picturesqueness which the poet needs for his purpose. But the latinized words of the eighteenth century are on a different footing. To us, nowadays, there is something pretentious and pedantic about them: they are artificial formations or adoptions, and not living words. English poets from time to time have been able to give a poetical colouring to such words,[120] and the eighteenth century is not without happy instances of this power. James Thomson here and there wins real poetic effects from his latinized vocabulary, as in such a passage as
Here lofty trees to ancient song unknown
The noble sons of potent heat and floods
Prone-rushing from the clouds, rear high to heaven
Their thorny stems, and broad around them throw
Meridian gloom.
(“Summer,” 653 foll.)[121]
The “return to Nature,” of which Thomson was perhaps the most noteworthy pioneer, brought back all the sights and sounds of outdoor life as subjects fit and meet for the poet’s song, and it is therefore of some interest, in the present connexion, to note that Wordsworth himself, who also knew how to make excellent use of high-sounding Latin formations, has perhaps nowhere illustrated this faculty better than in the famous passage on the Yew Trees of Borrowdale:
Those fraternal Four of Borrowdale
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove: