Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is much more abundant in the writers of the seventeenth century. It goes much more with the vernacular style, the homely style, than with the polished academic style. With the stream of English literature of the nineteenth century has mingled a current of German thought and mysticism, and this has greatly heightened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and Emerson and Whitman,--a depth and richness of spiritual and emotional background that the wits of Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems as if the subconscious self played a much greater part in the literature of the nineteenth century than of the eighteenth, probably because this term has been recently added to our psychology. As a rule it may be said that the more a writer condenses, the more suggestive his work will be. There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between the force expended in compacting a sentence and the force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a suggestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more suggestive than prose, because it is the result of a more compendious and sublimating process. The mind of the poet is more tense, he uses language under greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose medium of expression gives his mind more playroom. The poet often succeeds in focusing his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and he alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There are pregnant sentences in all the great prose writers; there are immortal lines only in the poets. Whitman said the word he would himself use as most truly descriptive of his “Leaves of Grass” was the word suggestiveness. “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display my theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought--there to pursue your own flight.” These sentences themselves are suggestive, because they bring before the mind a variety of definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight, and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a whole probably lies in its blending of realism and mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or in some way tallying with the laws and processes of nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few modern works do.