iambics which equal power could not have done more rigorously and systematically with the iambics away. In passing into verse, the poet may take such matter with him, but he must treat it in such a manner that, from the point of view of the pure thinker, there is a loss of the logical virtue. This is a point which might be discussed at length; suffice it to say that, with all the reverence that exists for poetry as distinct from prose, no one will deny that at the present moment there lies imbedded in the prose-treatises of the world, a mass of most precious substance distinct from all that can be found in

verse.

Again, prose is sufficient for the expression of at least a large proportion of all possible human emotion. It would be difficult to say at what pitch of mere feeling it would be absolutely necessary to go "up stairs" for the sake of adequately expressing it. Joy, sorrow, indignation, rage, love, hatred—there is ample scope for the expression of these passions within the limits of prose. Impassioned prose oratory can exhibit as splendid renderings of some of these passions, as any that can be found in poetry. Indeed there are some passions—as, for example, those of laughter and indignation-which find a more natural utterance in prose. And yet it is precisely in this matter of the expression of feeling or passion, that we first come in sight of the natural origin of metre. At a certain pitch of fervour or feeling, the voice does instinctively lift itself into song. Intense grief breaks into a wail, great joy bursts into a measured shout, pride moves to a slow march; all extreme passion tends to cadence. "And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept; and, as he went, thus he said, Oh, my son, Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee; Oh, Absalom, my son, my son!" Wherever there is emotion like this, we have a rudimentary metre in its expression; and verse in all its forms is nothing else than the prolongation and extended ingenious application of this hint of nature. It may be laid down as a principle, therefore, that impassioned writing tends to the metrical; and that, therefore, though this tendency may gratify itself to

a great length, almost to an indefinite length, within the limits of such wild metrical prose as it will itself create for the passing occasion, yet at a certain point in all feelings, and more particularly in such feelings as joy, sorrow, and love, it will overleap the boundary of what in any sense can be called prose, and seize, by a kind of necessity, on that artifice of verse which past custom has provided and consecrated. Walking by the river-side, full of thought and sadness, even the homely rustic minstrel will find it natural to pour forth his feelings to the established cadence of some well-known melody

"But minstrel Burn cannot assuage

His woes while time endureth,

To see the changes of this age,
Which fleeting Time procureth:
Full many a place stands in hard case,

Where joy was wont beforrow,

With Humes that dwelt on Leader braes,

And Scotts that dwelt on Yarrow;"

the very tune of the thought, as it were, keeping time with the arm, as it moves with the bow of an imaginary violin. And so with more modern and more cultured poets. Thus Tennyson :

"Break, break, break,

On thy cold grey stones, O sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me!

O, well for the fisherman's boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play;

O, well for the sailor-lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay.

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me."

This is not a case in which the same feeling, to the same intensity of pitch, could have been expressed in any form of metrical prose, and in which, therefore, the verse is only adopted to increase the beauty of the form; it is, we verily believe, a case in which the feeling had to overleap the bounds

of possible prose, in search of a means of appropriate expression, on pain of being repressed or mutilated if these means were not found.

There remains now only the field of representative literature, the literature of the concrete. How far does prose stretch over this field; and what portion of it, if any, is the exclusive possession of verse? The field divides itself, theoretically speaking, into two halves or sections-the domain of mere history and description, in which the business of the writer is with the actual concrete, the actual scenes and events of the world; and the high domain of imagination or fiction, in which the business of the writer is with concrete furnished forth by his own creative phantasy.

Is prose sufficient for all the purposes of historical or descriptive writing, viewed as separately as may be from that department of imaginative writing into which it shades off so gradually? We should say that it is. We should say that for all the purposes of exact record, of exact reproduction of fact in all its vast variety of kinds-fact of scenery, fact of biography, fact of history, fact even of transacted passionprose is sufficient, and verse unnecessary, or even objectionable. For the true and accurate retention and representation of all that man can observe (and a large and splendid function this is) prose is superior to verse; and when this function is committed to verse, there is an inevitable sacrifice of the pure aim of the function, though that sacrifice may at times be attended with the gain of something supposed to be better. That this statement may not be immediately assented to will arise from a confusion of the descriptive and the imaginative. Thomson's Seasons, and much of Wordsworth's poetry, are entitled descriptive compositions; but, properly considered, they are not records, but the imaginative use of records. Again, Homer is a narrative poet, but narration with him is but a special use of the imaginative faculty. Isolate strictly the department of historical or descriptive writing proper from that into which it so readily shades off, and prose is the legitimate king of it. We can conceive but of two apparent exceptions-first, where verse itself is one of the facts to be

recorded; and, secondly, where the historian or the describer waxes so warm in the act of description that he approaches the singing point. In the first case, verse must be treated as any other fact, that is, represented accurately, that is, quoted —which, however, is a prose feat; in the second case, it is not the facts that the historian sings, but his own impassioned feeling about them—a matter already provided for under another head.

And now for the real tug of war. What are the relative capabilities of Prose and Verse in the great field of fictitious or imaginative literature? It is needless to say that here it is that, by the universal impression of mankind, Verse is allowed the superior rank of the two sisters. The very language we use implies this. The word poetry literally means creation or fiction; and is thus co-extensive with the whole field of literature under notice. And yet it is by a deviation from the common usage of speech, that we use the word poetry in this its wide etymological sense. When we speak of a poet, we mean, unless we indicate otherwise, a man who writes in verse; when we speak of English poetry, we mean the library of English books written in verse. This is significant. It indicates the belief that the essential act of Tоinois is somehow connected with the metrical tendency, and best transacts itself in alliance with that tendency. In other words, it implies a conviction, founded if not on principle, at least on experience, that when the mind sets itself to work in that peculiar manner which we designate by the term imagination or imaginative exercise, the assumption of the metrical form of expression is natural, and, perhaps in some cases, essential to it. And yet this is contradicted at once, to some extent, by palpable fact. In the prose literature of all languages, there is a vast proportion of works in which the prevailing intention of the authors is that of strict Toinois, the strict invention and elaboration of an imaginary or fictitious concrete. There is the novel, the prose romance, the sentimental tale, the whole body of the prose literature of imagination in its thousand forms. Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, the Waverley Novels, and the like, are

prose efforts of a kind as strictly falling under the head of Tоinois or creation, in its widest sense, as the Prometheus Vinctus, Paradise Lost, or Tennyson's Princess. Accordingly, we do sometimes rank the writers of imaginative prose among poets or "makers." The question, then, arises: can we, by philosophical investigation, or by the examination of actual instances, determine in what precise conditions it is that the generic act of Toinσis, or imaginative exercise, disdains the level ground of prose, and even its highest mountain-tops, and rises instinctively and necessarily on the wings of verse?

ποιησις

There are various kinds of oinois, or imaginative exercise, according to the species of concrete imagined. There is the Tоinois of mere inanimate objects and scenery, as in much of Thomson; there is the Tomois of physiognomy and costume, as in much of Scott and Chaucer; there is the Toinois of incident and action, as in narrative poetry; there is the Toinois of feelings and states of mind, as in songs; there is, as a kind of extension of this last, the Toinois of character. From the masterly exercise of these different kinds of πoinσis in different forms of combination, arise the great kinds of poetry—the descriptive, the epic, the dramatic, and the lyric. But out of this objective classification of the varieties of imaginative exercise, can we derive the clue that we seek? At first sight not. If Thomson and Wordsworth describe imaginary scenes in verse, so do Dickens and Scott and a thousand others in prose; if we have admirable delineations of physiognomy and costume in the Canterbury Pilgrimage, so also have we in the Waverley Novels; if the Iliad is an effort of narrative imagination, so also is Don Quixote; if feelings and characters are represented in song and the Iambic drama, so are they also in prose fiction. And yet, as we hinted at the outset, there does seem to be a condition subsisting even in the nature of the objective matter imagined, when prose will not generally contain and convey that matter. What is that condition? The instances cited at the outset served vaguely to indicate it. In the quotation from Milton, and in that from Eschylus, it was felt that there was something in the actual matter of imaginary concrete presented by