Instances could be multiplied: they abound in Arnold’s poetry. It is true that Arnold did, more perhaps than any other poet of his time, bring back into verse something of the hard, jade-like, quality in a phrase that was characteristic of Milton, and almost even more so of Donne, Vaughan and many seventeenth-century lyrists, in a smaller degree of Gray and Wordsworth, hardly attempted by Keats, and less by Tennyson. It was a quality, it may perhaps be said, borrowed by poetry from the great prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne and Izaak Walton. It is a subtle quality, one difficult to get at or define, a very attractive thing when well used, and yet a quality to which many good poets are indifferent. When Tennyson writes, “His captain’s ear has heard them boom Bellowing victory, bellowing doom,” and Browning “And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,” and Aubrey de Vere “while such perfect sound Fell from his bowstring,” and Poe “Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche,” and Longfellow “We can make our lives sublime,” and Browning again “There’s heaven above, and night by night, I look right through its gorgeous roof,” the words bellowing, exquisite, perfect, brilliant (though Poe very nearly justifies himself), sublime, and gorgeous are all words badly used in poetry, mere counters taken lazily from the fingered stock of prose.[14] It is precisely the poet’s business to translate such words as these into poetry, to recreate the things that they stand for in the looseness of common talk and not to take them over with all their imperfections on them. In conversation, even in written prose, they have their place and are well enough, but in poetry they won’t do--though most poets have blundered in this matter at one time or another. It is not a case of forbidding the poet simple and commonplace words; these he may use as often as he will, if he can use them with mastery. He may say the moon is bright, because that means something definite, but he may not say the moon is exquisite, because that does not mean anything definite at all. And he may not even say the moon is brilliant--or at least not with any safety--because brilliant only means bright, which is definite, plus a qualification which is quite indefinite; it pretends to say something more than bright, but leaves us uninformed as to what the something more is, and so becomes a pretentious word. If the poet wants to emphasise the brightness he can do so by means of an image, or even by saying very bright, if he can, as sometimes he can, beguile us into honouring the “very” by rhythmic cunning. But “brilliant” in poetry is inorganic. Sublime, bellowing, gorgeous and the rest of them belong to a large group of words that are over-specific or under-specific in meaning for poetry. “Bellowing” implies a very particular kind of loud noise, but that particularity is of no significance, and all that the word gives us in Tennyson’s verse over