leasurable reading of some, or of all, of these
works, though remembering that such reading is not study, but only the
reviewing of records of work done by others, useful mainly as a
preparation for the real study which is to follow.

From all these works the student will not be likely to get a
definition of poetry which will satisfy him. One may say indeed with
truth that poetry is such expression as parallels the real and the
ideal by means of some rhythmic form. But this is not a complete
definition. Poetry is not to be bounded with a measuring line or
sounded with a plummet. The student must feel after its limits as
these authors have done, and find for himself its satisfactions. One
can feel more of its power than the mind can define; for definitions
are prose-forms of mind action, while poetry in its higher
manifestations is pure emotion, outpassing prose limits. Yet one can
know poetry if he cannot completely define it. The one essential
element which distinguishes it from prose is rhythm. In its primal
expressions this is mainly a rhythm of stresses and sounds--of accents
and measures, of alliterations and rhymes. Poetry began when man,
swaying his body, first sang or moaned to give expression to his joy
or sorrow. Its earliest forms are the songs which accompany the
simplest emotions. When rowers were in a boat the swinging oars became
rhythmic, and the oarsman's chant naturally followed. When the savage
overcame his enemy, he danced his war dance, and sang his war song
around his campfire at night, tone and words and gestures all fitting
into harmony with the movement of his body. So came the chants and
songs of work and of triumph. For the dead warrior the moan of
lamentation fitted itself to the slower moving to and fro of the
mourner, and hence came the elegy. In its first expression this was
but inarticulate, half action, half music, dumbly voicing the emotion
through the senses; its rhythms were all for the ear and it had little
meaning beyond the crude representation of some simple human desire
and grief.

It became poetry when it put a thrill of exultation in work, of
delight in victory, or of grief at loss by death, into some rhythmic
form tangible to the senses. There grew up thereafter a body of
rhythmic forms--lines, stanzas, accents, rhythms, verbal harmonies.
These forms are the outward dress of poetry, and may rightly be the
first subject of the student's study. We properly give the name of
po