The closest analysis discovers no
difference between the essential thought of the one and the other. But
Blake projected the thought through a mood of higher intensity, and, where
Ruskin perfectly ordered admirable words, he perfectly ordered the
best words. It is the controlling mood that differs, not the material
controlled. Hence it is that still another mind, starting from the same
radical perception, might transfigure it through a mood as urgent as
Blake's and produce yet another poem of which it could strictly be said
that here again were the best words in the best order. We should then
have three men moved by the same thought; in the one case the imaginative
shaping of the thought would fail to reach the point at which the record
and communication of ecstasy become the chief intention, and the expression
would be prose; in each of the other cases the shaping would pass beyond
that point, and there would be two separate moods expressed, each in the
terms of poetry.
One further qualification remains to be made. By words we must mean, as
Coleridge must have meant, words used for a purpose which they alone can
serve.
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