The Form and the Spirit
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of the field and mountain self-sown on the banks or near the sources are replaced by the blossoms of a careful culture. Still however reined in or penetrated and rendered grave by thought, the life of feeling is still there and the power and sincerity of the lyrical impulse abide as the base of the workings of the moved intelligence. But in the literary ages that are classical by imitation, there is ordinarily a great poverty, an absence or thinness of the lyrical element, the sincerity and confident selfpleasure of the feeling indispensable to the lyrical movement wither under the coldly observant and too scrutinising eye of the reflective reason, and the revival of song has to await the romantic movement of interest of a more eager and a wider intelligence which will endeavour to get back to some joy of the intimate powers of life and the vivid lyricism of the heart and the imagination. There is then a return by an imaginative effort to old cultivated forms of lyrical expression and to early simple movements like the ballad motive and in the end a great variety of experiments in new metrical moulds and subtle modifications of old structures, an attempt of the idea to turn back the thought mind to grave or happy sincerities of emotion or impose on it a more absolute assent to bare simplicities of thought and feeling and finally a living curiosity of the intelligence in the expression of all kinds and shades of sensation and emotion. The work of this developed poetic intellectuality differs from the early work whose spirit and manner it often tries hard to recover because it is the thought that is primarily at work and the form less a spontaneous creation of the soul than a deliberately intelligent structure, and while the movement of the pure lyrical impulse is entirely shaped by the feeling and the thought only accompanies it in its steps, here the thought actively intervenes and determines and cannot but sophisticate the emotional movement. This distinction has many consequences and most this pregnant result that even the simplicities of a developed poetical thought are willed simplicities and the end is a curiosity of work that has many triumphs of aesthetic satisfaction but not often any longer the native tones of the soul when the pure lyrical feeling was still possible.