least imaginative minds, content or forced to travel the monotonous round of experience prescribed by tradition and habit, come at times flying gleams from a larger world of ideas, a world which lies beyond the horizon of their daily lives. To that world poetry, like religion, is an avenue. It is a world of intenser emotional, intenser intellectual, intenser spiritual life than the one in which we hourly move.

The impassioned language appropriate to these higher moods, elevated as much above ordinary language as the mood is elevated above ordinary moods, we speak of as poetical. When that language is metrically arranged, ordered or marshalled in a particular way, in a rhythmically effective way, we call it poetry.

In the childhood of races the only literature is poetical literature. Before the use of written symbols is known, while memory is the only library in which books can be stored, language, metrically ordered, is naturally, if not necessarily, resorted to as more easily borne in mind and less liable to undergo alteration in passing from mouth to mouth than language not so ordered. To the keeping of verse men entrusted their most cherished traditions, as well as their most sacred lore. Hence arose the idea that all poetry was inspired, that the poet was the speaker of divine oracles; and thus from before the dawn of history poetry has been indissolubly associated with the highest instincts of the race, and has come to be a record of the profoundest convictions of men, their dearest hopes, their intensest griefs, and their most divine dreams. The river of poetry, as it flowed, parted into three main streams. Its earliest forms were, no doubt, hymnal, employed in worship. Then would come funeral and marriage hymns, songs celebrating victory or bemoaning defeat. Stories told in a kind of chanted verse

would very early be popular, and wandering minstrels, who embodied in verse of their own manufacture tales of war, love, or adventure, would be welcome guests in all primitive societies. The elaboration of such stories into a long connected series, unified by their relation to one great hero or one important event, would result in the epic or narrative poem, such as the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer. The word epic, from its derivation (Tos, a word, a saying), denotes a poem distinguished from a lyric in that it was without the usual musical accompaniment, and was recited or chanted rather than sung. Thus, long before dramatic poetry came to the birth, lyric poetry, expressive of pure emotion, and narrative poetry, descriptive of persons, actions and events, were familiar, and held in high estimation. Poetry in its earliest forms was religious; and an enquiry into the origin of the drama discloses that this, an independent branch of poetry, also sprang from religion, and was originally, in its humble beginnings, part of the ritual of worship. The classic drama took its rise in the hymns sung in honour of the God, at the festival of Dionysus; the romantic in the tableaux of scriptural scenes presented at the Easter festival of the Christian Church.

In the opinion of Aristotle, poetry was a species of imitation. But he so spoke of it, because, in his mind, poetry and the Attic drama were almost interchangeable terms. The whole field of poetry was covered by Attic tragedy; its lyric parts were hardly less important than the speeches or dialogue by which the action proceeded, and epic narrative had its counterpart in the descriptive speeches of the messengera character indispensable to the Greek stage, whence tradition and a severe taste had combined to exclude violent or crowded spectacles. Surveying the Greek drama, and find

ing there an intermingling of lyric, epic and dramatic elements, Aristotle concluded that poetry was a species of imitation. And so in a sense it is; but as the mental horizon is pushed back, as the boundaries of knowledge are extended, the territories of poetry are widened. Pioneer poets explore the newly acquired lands of science or of philosophy, and the barren tracts, which at first promised nothing, are tilled, and made to bear poetic flower and fruit. Poetry does not deal with all the facts of which we may gain a knowledge. Piece after piece of knowledge is appropriated by the poet, and shown by him in its connexion with the moral, emotional or spiritual life; but in the outer intellectual court of our being must remain many facts which we acquire without emotion, and retain merely as conveniences. With general concepts rather than with particulars, and with such facts only as are susceptible of relation with the emotions, which connect themselves with the soul of man, can poetry deal. The condition of its existence is a vast and continually increasing body of such facts. We must never make the mistake that poetry is a chronicle of things instead of a chronicle of thought about things. When Wordsworth said, 'The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions,' he meant that in the poet's mind thought was not disassociated from feeling—that his higher thoughts always tended to pass into the sphere of his feelings. And Tennyson has expressed the same idea when speaking of the poet. He said,

'The viewless arrows of his thought were headed

And winged with flame.'

That is with the pure flame of emotion. Thus far regarding the material. But art, in which man imitates as far as in him

lies the example of Nature, 'art is the reason of the thing without the matter.' What then of the art of poetry, the essence of which is the moulding and fashioning of the material according to the decree of the idea? The matter of poetry is life, and thought about life; its form is the way. in which that thought is presented. The material is partly shared with the other arts and philosophies which are also concerned with life and thought about life; its form, its manner of presentation of that material, is all its own. The form that we recognise as belonging exclusively to poetry is measured language, language dignified or beautified by the marshalling of its component words in a certain order. Beside the early mnemonic use of verse-to make poetry a memorable thing, there is another quality which is of its very essence. Constituted as we are, our sense of time, harmony and proportion takes pleasure in the ordering of words which constitutes the rhythmical beat of verse. But this is not all. Rhythm is not merely a pleasurable adjunct to poetry, it is, for a deeper reason, a vital part of its being. The facts of life, as subjects of man's thought, may find adequate expression in the words of prose, but when thought is quickened by contact with love, wonder, joy, indignation, grief, the words through which it is uttered spontaneously tend to assume rhythmic form-impassioned thought runs to music. Upon this point stress must here be laid, because rhythm, usually regarded as an ornamental setting of the thought, ought rather to be taken as a clue to the emotional state of the poet's mind. Rhythm represents emotion, and it gives rise to emotion; 'metre begins with pulse-beat.' In the presentation of the facts which have penetrated to the inner sphere of being, where thought and feeling tend to become one, facts ennobled to the rank of

moral or spiritual truths, the deeper emotions of the poet are stirred, and by the vibration, the rhythmic movement of his verse, these emotions are represented and symbolised. The rhythm of the poem is the outward and visible sign and the correlative of the emotion that accompanied the thought in the poet's mind, and into it he translates not the idea alone but the intensity with which he feels it. Thus it is seen how rhythm communicates excitement similar to though weaker than that which gave it birth, and thus also it is seen that metrical arrangement which is without warrant in the feelings results in doggerel. Shakespere in his play of Julius Cæsar, desiring to convey the idea that the speech of Brutus over the body of Cæsar was a dispassionate logical appeal to the intelligence of the crowd, made by one who himself was far from anxious to arouse the emotions of his listeners, withholds from that speech all rhythmic life, reserving for Antony's address, wherein the orator makes a deliberate effort to kindle their passion by every rhetorical artifice, the metrical movement representative of his strong though restrained feeling. The complexity of structure or greater rapidity of lyric poetry typifies the high tension of the feelings, and, as the pulse responds to emotion, is quickened and intensified by it, so is it with the rhythm; in longer poems a simpler and less exciting movement is suitable, since the more intense the emotion the shorter will be its duration, and very complex rhythms cease after a time to produce their first effects, and are moreover difficult to sustain.

The exciting cause or motive cannot sustain the inspired or uplifted mood through long flights, and in such poems as 'Paradise Lost' there are stretches of table-land, with here and there an elevated plateau, while at times a great peak