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any case they would mean nothing to us, since we should see nothing of them. So that what he has to record must be recorded in words, and in words alone. This, by the way, is the reason why it is so bad, when you are reading poetry aloud to people, to add to the words all sorts of gestures and facial expressions. The poet when he has finally chosen and arranged his words, if his poem is worth reading at all, has already said completely what he had to say, and if we add to his perfect expression this other feeble expression of our own, it is nothing but an impertinence, as though we were saying, "This poet is not able to express himself very clearly, so we must help him out."

Having now seen that words are what he has entirely to depend upon, we shall realise how necessary it is that the selection and arranging of words shall be his own doing and not as he remembers it to have been done by some one else. If the poet really sees that scene of the country lane and blown leaves with his own eyes and in his own heart, he will be so intent upon his personal experience that his mind will be absorbed in inventing a personal way of expressing that experience; he will, in fact, create, and it is just this creating that makes us create for ourselves when we read his poem, and so gives us so much precious delight, as I have already explained. But if his experience is a vague and incomplete one, his mind, instead of working vigorously to create for itself, will lazily turn away to remember what some one else has said about the same kind of thing, and since one mind can never repeat another mind's work perfectly, he

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scattered before the wind. But the cloud of leaves, driven along in commotion, brought into his mind. an image of huddled ghosts crowding before the enchanter who had power to drive them forth at his will. He set this vision down very simply in words, but perfectly

"Ghosts from an enchanter fleeing."

And then, although he had already conceived the idea of the leaves driven before the wind in words that could express it quite directly-"thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead are driven.. yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red"- he sharpens the whole picture in our minds by taking our thoughts for a moment to that other idea of the ghosts and the enchanter, and then telling us that the thing of which he is actually writing is like that other thing of which he is not actually writing. And this using of an image to make the impression of what he sees even clearer than it would have been by direct statement, however exact and lucid, is an act of the imagination, which word you see is built upon the word image.

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