You feel that as an instrument of expression it is sharp and polished and shining; it is always bright and defined in detail.

The Great Romantics go to work in other ways.

Their poetry is a thing of half lights and half spoken suggestions, of hints that imagination will piece together, of words that are charged with an added meaning of sound over sense, a thing that stirs the vague and impalpable restlessness of memory or terror or desire that lies down beneath in the minds of men.

It rouses what a philosopher has called the "Transcendental feeling," the solemn sense of the immediate presence of "that which was and is and ever shall be," to induce which is the property of the highest poetry.

You will find nothing in classical poetry so poignant or highly wrought as Webster's "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," and the answer, "I think not so: her infelicity Seemed to have years too many," or so subtle in its suggestion, sense echoing back to primeval terrors and despairs, as this from _Macbeth_: "Stones have been known to move and trees to speak; Augurs and understood relations have By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks brought forth The secret'st man of blood." or so intoxicating to the imagination and the senses as an ode of Keats or a sonnet by Rossetti.