Poetry and Childhood by Alice Meynell — Read

Which is the language of poetry? For each, perhaps, the language that first named for him a flock of sheep, a hill, a mountain river, or whatever thing touched a child's mind with a remote and yet familiar love. The poets who have for him a lifelong advantage over all others are the poets who write that tongue. No other word than theirs will be to him the very name of what he finds so fresh. Thus, for my own part, reading again the _Chants du Crépuscule_, the _Feuilles d'Automne_, _Contemplations_, and _Voix Intérieures_, I own the power of the poet who knows the true name of an orchard, and so calls it ‘le verger'. ‘Le verger' is purely yonder steep field of fruit-trees round and soft above their separate shadows. In another tongue the name is translated, and therefore removed by one step; it has no longer the shape and figure and spirit which the name first known has for the child learning the thing and the word in one.

Besides, Victor Hugo falls in with the mood of one who has profound childish memories connected with his common words, by writing so closely of infantine things as though to secure the charm for all a reader's lifetime to come, and to establish the authority of his French precisely upon those names of childish import that are most subject to such an early spell.