AUTHORS' FAVOURITE WORDS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] Sia,—The " favourite words" of some prose authors may perhaps be as easily detected as the "missing word" from a popular prize competition; but when the works of a great poet are in question it seems to me that the critic who would discover this bias must penetrate his author's most persistently recurring attitude towards his theme—as distinguished from his subject-matter. There is always a pre-ordained word tc characterize each different phase of beauty; Wordsworth called it the " inevitable " word, and he said that Goethe's poetry was not " inevitable enough." In Robert Bridges, than whom we have no more delicate exponent of Beauty, the word " beauty " itself is for ever recurring in his sonnet sequence, " The Growth of Love." And indeed " beauty " is a beautiful word—beauty and its concomitant joy:—
"All earthly beauty hath one cause and proof To lead the pilgrim soul to beauty above (Sonnet 35).
- • • • • • Joy's ladder it is, reaching from home to home (Sonnet 35) The very names of things belov'd are dear, And sounds will gather beauty from their sense.. . ."
(Sonnet 4).
The curious reader who cares to count will find beauty and joy fifty-seven times in " The Growth of Love" alone.—I am,
Sir, &c., THOMAS CASs.
BE Earl's Road, Southampton.
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