springs into the air to commune with the sun and stars. The rhythmic movement in such poems ought to be simple, yet sufficient to keep alive, during the comparatively lowlying passages, the idea of a general inspiring motive of which it is symbolic. Essential poetry, however, throughout no long poem can be.

One frequently reads and hears it said that the end of poetry is to give pleasure. It has other and higher ends; but a pleasure is none the less to be derived from it;—a pleasure in the form, whether from its fitness to the subject or its innate dignity and loveliness, a delight which is partly one of sense of the ear; and a pleasure in the apprehension of the force or beauty of the matter, of the thought which is its substance. The object of the student will be to fit himself for participation in both these pleasures by an education of feeling as well as of intellect.

Discussing the relation of form and matter, Aristotle speaks of existence, the totality of existing things, as lying between the two poles of an absolutely formless matter and an absolutely matterless form; and we may think of poetry, or rather the sphere of poetry, as lying between the poles of prose and of music. Prose depends for its value upon its substance, upon the weight of its thought rather than upon the setting of that thought, because it is in the main a vehicle for the conveyance of direct facts and direct thought about those facts. With music it is different, since music is dependent for its value upon its form, form and matter being in music completely fused; in a word, the form of music is its substance. The power of prose lies in the quality of its matter, the power of music in the quality of its form. But that poetry is the highest, the most perfect, where it is impossible to determine with any kind of pre

cision whether the charm, the power it wields, is resident in the thought or in its expression; it is thought and language inseparably at one. The moment it becomes possible to say,' Here the delight given is intellectual and due to the idea,' or, 'Here the delight given is sensuous and due to the form,' at that moment the poetry ceases to be of the highest quality. Poetry occupies the whole mid-region between prose and music, dealing with every fact of life which interests man as a sentient and intellectual being and may be imaginatively seized, and with every ideal which is susceptible of articulate expression. Whoever speaks of poetry as attaining supreme excellence by its style, the perfection of its form alone; or whoever speaks of it as attaining supreme excellence by its substance, its thought alone, has not yet grasped the true nature of poetry. Perfection of form, subtle propriety of phrase will give to any poem grace, but not the higher merit of dignity; depth or range of thought will secure for it value, but dignity which speaks the balance, which consists in intrinsic value of substance joined to intrinsic beauty of form, may still be wanting to it. So close and vital in the best poetry is the bond between the idea and the language that they are remembered together, for the art of the poet has pronounced a decree of indissoluble union between them. Lying, then, between the poles of prose and of music, poetry has a tendency to fall away into weakness towards the one or the other. It may become weak by inclining towards the sphere of prose, the sphere of logical statement, as in the case of Pope's poetry; or it may fall from its high estate by invading the sphere of music, the sphere o. symbol and sound, as with Mr Swinburne. Our own century best exhibits the change between the poetry approximating to music inaugurated by Shelley

and the poetry approximating to impassioned or philosophical prose inaugurated by Wordsworth and Browning. Music is, in a sense, inarticulate poetry; it gives expression to emotions which have not risen above the surface so far as to become ideas, or to be associated with definite thought. Upon the hidden strings of man's emotional nature music plays as the wind upon the Æolian harp. But in addition to his sentient, man has an intellectual life. Homer, by his 'articulately-speaking men,' meant men who had risen to the high dignity of thoughtful speech, to the use of words or language definitely expressive of ideas. Poems, whose strength lies in their colour or rhythm, almost imperceptibly approach and shade off into the sphere of music; they are music very imperfectly articulated. Why, some may ask, cannot poetry depend upon its rhythmic life alone? The music of words has indeed a delicacy, a melodious accent not to be matched by the keys of any instrument, because from its connexion with life each word bears with it a hundred whispers from the forgotten past; yet because words cannot form any but a single series of notes, a simple melody, because the harmonic, contrapuntal and orchestral effects of music are impossible to it, poetry cannot compete with music in the medium of sounds. Without a nerve of thought, it has no real or enduring vitality; but when so quickened, the lesson of the inner music is a higher one than that of the outer, the rhythm of thought is more thrilling than that of sound. 'It is not metres but a metre-making argument that makes a poem; a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.'* Aristotle, in the exposition of his doctrine of the 'Four

* Emerson.

Causes,' as it is called, tells us, that in order to arrive at a clear understanding of any individual thing, we must make four enquiries respecting it. We must ask what is the material which conditions its existence? What is its essential form? Through what agency is it produced? and What is the end attained by it?

If we examine the idea of poetry in this way, as indeed we have to some extent already done, we shall at once be satisfied that its existence is dependent upon the thoughts and feelings with which man views the world of which he is a part, and upon the actions and events of which he is a doer or a sufferer. That poetry has promise of being the strongest and most enduring that works upon the largest body of material, takes fullest account of the thoughts, the feelings, the doings and sufferings of the human race. To dramatic poetry, therefore, has been conceded the highest place, because its range is widest, because it addresses itself not to a representation of one phase of thought or of feeling, but to a representation of life in all its more striking phases, of life as it really is, and as it interests us. The high-water mark of its intellectual achievement is touched in a nation's dramatic poetry. the epic there are elements which it has in common with drama and lyric, modified indeed, but present. The distinctive character of lyric poetry is its absolute subjectivity. Expressive of an individual mood, occasioned perhaps by some external circumstance, but, nevertheless, taking its essential colour and shape from the individual mind, lyric poetry is subjective. But it is something more. Wordsworth, in his 'Excursion,' is largely a subjective poet, but 'The Excursion' is no lyric. The lyric is concerned with one memorable incident, one strong emotion, one imperative

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thought. It is essentially a song capable of being sung by one voice or by a chorus, accompanied by some musical instrument. And 'capable of being sung,' not that it must be sung to be rightly appreciated, but that it ought to have the qualities of song. Lyrics have been regarded by some as the only true poetry, and such persons have declined to give the name to long philosophical or descriptive poems. This judgment is unwarrantably narrow. Dante Gabriel Rossetti is reported to have said that he hated long poems. But he did not in reality hate long poems. Nothing would have given him greater delight than a long poem, had it been possible to keep throughout the level of essential poetry. But it is not possible; and so it comes that the lyric, which, in the hands of a master, may be from first to last at the same level, intense, flawless and complete, is the most fascinating of all forms of poems. The lyric goes straight to the heart, for it is the song of the heart, and gives voice to the feelings that have their home in the secret depths of our being, to the affections that are primal. Hence there is a closer similarity between the lyric poetry of all races than exists between any other of their art products. In the expression of the deepest human feeling all nations tend to become one nation, all peoples to merge into one people. When we get down to the foundations we find the whole world kin. Religion, affection, patriotism; these are the chief springs of song; or, as we may more at length express it, in our relation to the unseen world, and to the Supreme Power, 'in Whom we live and move and have our being,' in our relation to our fellows, and in our relation to the country of our ancestors, to which we are bound by indissoluble and sacred links; in these relationships, whence spring the intensest and most spontaneous of our joys and