He thinks differently from other people, and not only more quickly; and his mind works in a kind of double process. Take, for instance, this phrase: Ravenous all the line for speed. An image occurs to him, the image of a runner, who, as we say, 'devours' the ground. Thereupon he translates this image into his own dialect, where it becomes intensely vivid if it can be caught in passing; only, to catch it in passing, you must go through two mental processes at once. That is why he cannot be read aloud. In a poem where every line is on the pattern of the line I have quoted, every line has to be unriddled; and no brain works fast enough to catch so many separate meanings, and to translate as it goes. Meredith has half the making of a great artist in verse. He has harmony without melody; he invents and executes marvellous variations upon verse; he has footed the tight-rope of the galliambic measure and the swaying planks of various trochaic experiments; but his resolve to astonish is stronger than his desire to charm, and he lets technical skill carry him into such excesses of ugliness in verse as technical skill carried Liszt, and sometimes Berlioz, in music. Meredith has written lines which any poet who ever wrote in English would be proud of; he has also written lines as tuneless as a deal table and as rasping as a file. His ear for the sweep and texture of harmonies, for the building up of rhythmical structure, is not seconded by an ear for the delicacies of sound in words or in tunes. In one of the finest of his poems, the _Hymn to Colour_, he can begin one stanza with this ample magnificence: Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes The house of heaven splendid for the bride; and can end another stanza thus lumpishly: With thee, O fount of the Untimed! to lead, Drink they of thee, thee eyeing, they unaged Shall on through brave wars waged. Meredith is not satisfied with English verse as it is; he persists in trying to make it into something wholly different, and these eccentricities come partly from certain theories. He speaks in one place of A soft compulsion on terrene By heavenly, which is not English, but a misapplication of the jargon of science. In another place he speaks of The posts that named the swallowed mile, which is a kind of pedantry. He chooses harsh words by preference, liking unusual or insoluble rhymes, like 'haps' and 'yaps,' 'thick' and 'sick,' 'skin' and 'kin,' 'banks' and 'thanks,' 'skims' and 'limbs.' Two lines from _The Woods of Westermain_, published in 1883 in the _Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth_, sum up in themselves the whole theory: Life, the small self-dragon ramped, Thrill for service to be stamped.