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in communicating what was supposed to be incommunicable. Often, when we say that such and such a writer gives us "new glimpses," or "opens up new thoughts," it only means that he has discovered how to express such thoughts, so that we can realize and recognize them. He is not an inventor, but a revealer.

      And the highest revealer is the great poet. Poetry is language and music. Musicians tell us that music is intended to impart what language cannot express—something unspeakably more delicate, more subtle, emotionally more powerfully or more tranquillizing. But music must not aim at too much. It cannot really describe action or define thoughts; it can only translate feelings and moods into sounds. Now just as music is always advancing, always endeavouring to fulfil more perfectly the functions of art—which are, as I have said, to communicate the spirit of one human being to his fellows—so language also is ever struggling to enlarge its powers and to do what musicians tell us music alone can do. Language, too, must translate feeling, and moods, but into words. It in a sense invades the region of music. And herein lies the justification—the necessity—for poetry, or for a prose which is virtually poetry in its language and movement and imagination. Poetry, in that broad sense, must always be the literary form for the expression of that which is most difficult to express, I mean of anything which is pervaded by a rare exaltation and passion of feeling, or by a delicate grace and charm.

      Some people pretend to think that poetry is a wholly artificial thing; that it is merely a pleasing trick, when it is not an irritating trick, with language. Well, alas! it is quite natural that many stern spirits should be irritated by verses; for it is entirely true that nine-tenths of what is being, or has been, written in verse might better have been written in prose, or rather not written at all. The young author, and, for the matter of that, the old author, who thinks that he has a perfect right to choose between the verse form and the prose form simply according as he can versify or not, is grievously in the wrong. There is no more justification for, say, a purely didactic poem or descriptive poem than there is for the rhyming which begins somebody's treatise on optics with these egregious words:—

      When parallel rays

       Come opposite ways

       And fall upon opposite sides.

      Everything depends upon the nature of that which a man has to say.

      What are the external marks of poetry as distinct from real prose? These: the choice of words of a special emotional or pictorial force, combined with musical cadences, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme. And why are these employed? To tickle the ear? By no means. It is simply because they are most effective agents in that communication of his mood and spirit which is the aim of the artist. When a mere fact has to be stated, there is no defence for verse, unless as an aid to memory, just as we say—

      Thirty days hath September,

       April, June, and November.

      When a thing can be said just as well in prose, there is no excuse for not putting it in prose. That axiom should kill off half our amateur poets and rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred, exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with exquisite perceptions, then there can be no true and full communication to another mind, unless that mind also is stirred, exalted or made to tingle. Music can so dispose that other mind. So too can language; for, under the influence of poetry of perfect sound, we find stealing over us, thanks largely to the sound, a mood which could never result from prose; and so our minds are polarized to feel the actual thing expressed exactly as the writer feels it, to see it exactly as he sees it. Verse-poetry, therefore, is no idle invention. It has its sound philosophical basis; and where poetry is really demanded by the subject, it is part and parcel of the supreme literary gift to wed the music of the verse so aptly to the thought, that the communication from soul to soul is utterly complete.

      Is verse a mere conviction? Let us see. Does any one pretend that his spirit would be just as much moved by the mere sense of this passage of Tennyson, if it were stripped of its verse form and turned into prose:—

      Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.

       Tears from the depths of some divine despair

       Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

       In looking on the happy autumn fields,

       And thinking of the days that are no more.

      and—

      Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

       And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

       On lips that are for others; deep as love,

       Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

       O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

      If he does, let us not envy him his powers of perception or sensation.

      Would you feel for Coleridge just the same mood of sympathy, if he told you his sad case in prose, as when he writes:—

      A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,

       A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

       Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

       In word or sigh or tear.

      Listen once more to this:—

      Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

       Ere the sorrow comes with years?

       They are leaning their young heads against their mothers—

       And that cannot stop their tears. The young lambs are bleating in the meadows; The young birds are chirping in the nest; The young fawns are playing with the shadows; The young flowers are blowing toward the west— But the young, young children, O my brothers, They are weeping bitterly!— They are weeping in the playtime of the others, In the country of the free.

      Verily I believe a few of these stanzas of Elizabeth Barrett Browning have more effect in moving the average human soul than forty prose sermons and a hundred prose tracts. And why? Because they express, not mere thoughts, not mere arguments, but a mood, a disposition, a soul.

      Verse-poetry can never die. It is for evermore inseparable from the art of communicating the spirit in words.

      The supreme literary gift then is the power to embody even the most subtle conception in a communicable shape. And is this a mere knack, with which brain-power has little or nothing to do? Not so. Observe what the task implies on the part of the writer, over and above his perfect control of words.

      It implies, to wit, that he shall first realize those conceptions luminously to himself. Before he can utter them, his brain must have grasped them, formed a vivid picture of them. Most of us, when we become aware of a fancy or a feeling within ourselves, are unable to get it into focus. The power of undergoing a deep emotion, of thinking a far-reaching thought, of experiencing a keen sensation, is, I assert, by no means rare in the world. But as soon as we begin to look steadfastly at it and try to realize to ourselves exactly what it is like and what it means; when we ask ourselves, "what precisely is it I am thinking and feeling?" it evades us; it begins to break up and fade away, like a phantom or like mist. It is as when we think of some one's face, filled with a certain expression. The face starts out before our mind's eye, and for a moment we see it well and truly. But for most of us, unless we are painters, or possess the gift which might make us painters, it is impossible to keep that face, with that expression, steadily before our inward vision. As we gaze upon it, it changes and passes into a blur and refuses to be held.

      But the mental retina of the great painter can hold such things as he has seen till he transfers them to the canvas; so can the brain of the great masters who paint for us in words, till they embody them in delicate prose or exquisite poetry. The lack of power to express often comes of a lack of this power to realize; and that power, I believe, is what is meant by "the vision and the faculty divine," and by "shaping imagination," and by other phrases which get so bandied to and fro that the world almost ceases to attach any meaning to them at all.

      I remember some years ago, in an essay on Literary

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