The words which a man of genius selects are as much his own as his thoughts. They are not the dress, but the incarnation, of his thought, as the body contains the soul. As John Foster once said, “his diction is not the clothing of his sentiments, it is the skin; and to alter the language would be to flay the sentiments alive.” Analyze a speech by either of the great orators I have just named, and a critical study will satisfy you that the crushing force of his arguments lies not less in the nicety and skill with which the words are chosen, than in the granite-like strength of his thought. Attempt to substitute other words for those that are used, and you will find that the latter are part and parcel of the speaker’s mind and conception; that every word is accommodated with marvellous exactness to all the sinuosities of the thought; that not even the most insignificant term can be changed without marring the force and completeness of the author’s idea. If any other words can be used than those which a writer does use, he is a bungling rhetorician, and skims only the surface of his theme. True as this is of the best prose, it is doubly true of the best poetry; it is a linked strain throughout. It has been said by one who was himself a consummate master of language, that if, in the recollection of any passage of Shakespeare, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the forty thousand words in the language, and not one shall fit the vacant place but that which the poet put there. Though he uses only the simplest and homeliest terms, yet “you might as well think,” says Coleridge, “of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakespeare.”
Who needs to be told how much the wizard sorcery of Milton depends on the words he uses? It is not in what he directly tells us that his spell lies, but in the immense suggestiveness of his verse. In Homer, it has been justly said, there are no hidden meanings, no deeps of thought into which the soul descends for lingering contemplation; no words which are key-notes, awakening the spirit’s melodies,--
“Untwisting all the links that tie The hidden soul of harmony.”