It was the cunning proportion in which the ordinary
metals were balanced against each other, the perfection of form, and
the nice gradations of thickness, that wrought the miracle. And it is
precisely so with the language of poetry. The genius of the poet will
tell him what word to use (else what use in his being poet at all?);
and even then, unless the proportion and form, whether of parts or
whole, be all that Art requires and the most sensitive taste finds
satisfaction in, he will have failed to make what shall vibrate through
all its parts with a silvery unison,--in other words, a poem.
We think the component parts of English were in the latter years of
Elizabeth thus exquisitely proportioned one to the other. Yet Bacon had
no faith in his mother-tongue, translating the works on which his fame
was to rest into what he called "the universal language," and affirming
that "English would bankrupt all our books." He was deemed a master of
it, nevertheless; and it is curious that Ben Jonson applies to him in
prose the same commendation which he gave Shakspeare in verse, saying,
that he "performed that in our tongue which may be compared or
preferred either to _insolent Greece or haughty Rome_"; and he adds
this pregnant sentence:--"In short, within his view and about his time
were all the wits born that could honor a language or help study.
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