What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. Have, get before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ Lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and May day in girl and boy,
Most, O Maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Here, at last, in one of the most hackneyed of poetic subjects and after an opening line almost banal, we are come upon an original vein of poetry; a spiritual motivation, a vigour of word-painting, and a metrical proficiency of very real distinction. It was written in 1877, and its existence argues for Father Hopkins more than a mere dilettante use of the poetic faculty. Another poem of the same year, "The Starlight Night," is almost equally striking in music and in metaphor. But it must be acknowledged that both of these poems bear traces of that eccentricity, that curious and perverse construction, which point forward to Father Hopkins' eventual excesses. Lucidity was the chief grace he sacrificed as years wore on; and his fondness for uncommon words—at one moment academic and literate, at another provincial—did not help matters. "Inversnaid" (written in 1881) is an extreme instance of this later manner: there is about it a certain bounding and prancing charm, but in truth the stream's highroad is sadly obstructed by Anglo-Saxon and other archaic undergrowth. Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern and the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, send the reader's mind back with some ruefulness to that lovely random line from the "Vision of Mermaids":
To know the dusk depths of the ponderous sea!
We are not born original in these latter days
