"We have spoken somewhat contemptuously of 'fine language.' Let no one suppose from this that we have any antipathy to literary splendour in itself, apart from the subject on which it is exercised. Quite the contrary. To write plainly on a fine subject is to set a jewel in wood. Did our givers of literary advice only realise this, we should hear less of the preposterous maxim 'aim always at writing simply.' Conceive merely Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Milton, and de Quincey rendered into 'simple English.' Their only fit place would be the fire. The true abuse of 'fine language' is rich diction applied to a plain subject, or lofty words to weak ideas; like most devices in writing this one also is excellent when employed as a means, evil when sought as an end."
This is in an early essay: it is doubtful if later he would have so precisely matched fine writing and good matter. In his own work the finer meanings are not seldom put into the humbler words.
For his words he had no need to seek far; they were more naturally remembered for use in the poetry of splendid artifice than the language of the street. His search was not deliberate. In the offices of the Church he found words to his hand, but he did not go to the offices on their account. It is doubtful if he borrowed even a monosyllable from a poet he did not love. Very rarely he made notes: "_Pleached_--an invaluable word," is the only memorandum I have come across. He had no list, like Rossetti's, of "stunning words for poetry," among them "gonfalon," "virelay," "citole," and "shent." He was at no pains to coin or collect, nor even to possess a theory. Bulwer Lytton's wholesale condemnation of Latinisms, and professed preference for such forms as _scatterling_ and _doomsman_ for "vagabond" and "executioner," were not the ways of a liberal master:--
"The labour, the art, the studious vocabulary," says the writer in the _Nation_, November 23, 1907, "are locked together within the strenuous grasp of the man's sincerity. There is no dissociating, no disintegrating, such poems as these; and Francis Thompson's heart beats in the words '_roseal_,' '_cymars_,' '_frore_,' '_amiced_,' '_lamped_,' and so forth."