inging is heard amid the din of critics, philosophers,
jurists, scientists. See how in France we find historians,
letter-writers, philosophers, moralists, but not a verse worth hearing
since the dry-light prose-versicles of Voltaire. Observe how in England
our so-called poetry is but prose sawed into lines of five feet each,
and contains not one drop of the sap of nature, unless it be some
suggestion in Thomson and a half-ashamed trace in Collins or in Gray. As
for the last really great figure, Pope, and all his rhyming brood, they
are but arguers, critics, moralists, describers, satirists in verse.
They show no inspiration, and could show none, because science and
reasoning forbade it to them. The wings of their imaginations are
cropped close by the hard facts and knowledge of our time. Let us cry
_Ichabod_ over poetry, for its glory is departed, and departed for
ever."

It would scarcely have been an unnatural thing for an observant lover of
poetry at that date to make such a speech, and, without the light of
later experience, it would have been impossible to confute him. Yet had
that same man lived the length of another human life, seen still more
scientists make their steps forward in discovery, seen another crop of
even subtler philosophers at their analytic work, witnessed the "Triumph
of Reason and Democracy" in the shape of the French Revolution:--had he
lived to see all this, he would have beheld meanwhile something which
shows how fallible is prophecy. He would have seen, to wit, a most
marvellous, rich and widespread outburst of the strenuous natural poetry
he thought dead. From amid the critical rationalism of Germany would
come the fullest, most fervid voices of poetry with which that land had
ever echoed--voices full of vigour and passion, full of imagination and
music, singing of romance and story, of nature and man and human
life--the voices of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Wieland. From
France would be heard Beranger's stirring songs and the deepening
romantic notes of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. From Scotland would sound
the passionate song of Burns and later the romantic lays of Scott; and
soon would arise in England the graver tones of Wordsworth, Nature's
high-priest, the deep, half-romantic, half-religious music of the mystic
Coleridge, the fiery ecstasies of Shelley, the rebellious melancholies
of Byron, the sensuous raptures of Keats,--these and other tones of less
compass or less power.

An