There is true feeling here, and the sigh of the pines is heard in the verses. I can find only one epithet to hang a criticism on, and that is the “_wail_ of the forest” in the last line, which is not in keeping with the general murmur. Now I do not suppose that the poet turned over any vocabulary to find the words he wanted, but followed his own poetic instinct altogether in the affair. But suppose for a moment, that instead of being a true poet, he had been only a gentleman versifying; suppose he had written, “This is the primitive forest.” The prose meaning is the same, but the poetical meaning, the music, and the cadence would be gone out of it, and gone forever. Or suppose that, instead of “garments green,” he had said “dresses green”; the idea is identical, but the phrase would have come down from its appropriate remoteness to the milliner’s counter. But not to take such extreme instances, only substitute instead of “harpers hoar,” the words “harpers gray,” and you lose not only the alliteration, but the fine hoarse sigh of the original epithet, which blends with it the general feeling of the passage. So if you put “sandy beaches” in the place of “rocky caverns,” you will not mar the absolute truth to nature, but you will have forfeited the relative truth to keeping. When Bryant says so exquisitely, Painted moths Have _wandered the blue sky_ and died again, we ruin the poetry, the sunny spaciousness of the image, without altering the prose sense, by substituting Have _flown through the clear air_. But the words “poetic diction” have acquired a double meaning, or perhaps I should say there are two kinds of poetic diction, the one true and the other false, the one real and vital, the other mechanical and artificial. Wordsworth for a time confounded the two together in one wrathful condemnation, and preached a crusade against them both. He wrote, at one time, on the theory that the language of ordinary life was the true dialect of poetry, and that one word was as good as another. He seemed even to go farther and to adopt the Irishman’s notion of popular equality, that “one man is as good as another, and a dale better, too.” He preferred, now and then, prosaic words and images to poetical ones. But he was not long in finding his mistake and correcting it. One of his most tender and pathetic poems, “We are Seven,” began thus in the first edition: A simple child, _dear brother Jim_. All England laughed, and in the third edition Wordsworth gave in and left the last half of the line blank, as it has been ever since. If the poem had been a translation from the Turkish and had begun, A simple child, dear Ibrahim, there would have been nothing unpoetical in it; but the “dear brother Jim,” which would seem natural enough at the beginning of a familiar letter, is felt to be ludicrously incongruous at the opening of a poem.