And in its larger sense as well the language of poetry is made up inevitably of symbols—of symbols for things in terms of other things, for things in terms of feelings, for feelings in terms of things. It is the language not of objects, but of the complex relations of objects. And the agency that moulds it is the ceaselessly active power that is special to poetry only in degree—_imagination_—that fuses the familiar and the strange, the thing I feel and the thing I see, the world within and the world without, into a _tertium quid_, that interprets both.” The eighteenth century was not perhaps so emphatically and entirely the “age of prose and reason” as is sometimes thought, but it could scarcely be called the “age of imagination,” and poetry, in its highest sense (“high poetry,” as Maeterlinck would call it), being of imagination all compact, found no abiding place there. Most words, we may say, potentially possess at least two or more significations, their connotative scope varying according to the knowledge or culture of the speaker or reader. First of all, there is the logical, their plain workaday use, we might call it; and next, and above and beyond all this, they have, so to speak, an exciting force, a power of stimulating and reviving in the mind and memory all the associations that cluster around them. Nearly all words carry with them, in vastly varying degrees, of course, this power of evocation, so that even commonplace terms, words, and phrases hackneyed and worn thin by unceasing usage, may suddenly be invested with a strange and beautiful suggestiveness when they are pressed into the service of the highest poetic imagination. And in the same way the æsthetic appeal of words of great potential value is reinforced and strengthened, when in virtue of their context, or even merely of the word or words to which they are attached, they are afforded a unique opportunity of flashing forth and bringing into play all the mysterious powers and associations gathered to themselves during a long employment in prose and verse, or on the lips of the people: All the charm of all the muses often flowering in a lonely word. Poetry of the highest value and appeal may be, and often is, as we know from concrete examples that flash into the mind, written in commonplace, everyday terms, and we ask ourselves how it is done.[264] There are the mysterious words of the dying Hamlet: The rest is silence, or the line quoted by Matthew Arnold[265] as an instance when Wordsworth’s practice is to be found illustrating his theories: And never lifted up a single stone, or the wonderful lines which seem to bring with them a waking vision of the beauty of the English countryside, radiant with the promise of Spring: daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.