Lectures on English Poets

No one who has read any early poems, of whatever nation, can have failed to notice a freshness in the language -- a sort of game flavor, as it were -- that gradually wastes out of it when poetry becomes domesticated, so to speak, and has grown to be a mere means of amusement both to writers and readers, instead of answering a deeper necessity in their natures. Our Northern ancestors symbolized the eternal newness of song by calling it the Present, and its delight by calling it the drink of Odin.

There was then a fierce democracy of words; no grades had then been established, and no favored ones advanced to the Upper House of Poetry. Men had a meaning, and so their words had to have one, too. They were not representatives of value, but value itself. They say that Valhalla was roofed with golden shields; that was what they believed, and in their songs they called them golden shingles. We should think shields the more poetical word of the two; but to them the poetry was in the _thing_, and the thought of it and the phrase took its life and meaning from them.