on of any of the great names of
English literature. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him
who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than
ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make
poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes
honey. Many of our would-be young poets bring us the crude nectar from
the fields--fine descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so
on--and expect us to accept them as honey. The quality of the man
makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe
birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn
greatly.

Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the "chief life of
modern versifying consists in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. "Verse
without rhyme," he says, "is a body without a soul, or a bell without
a clapper." He thinks Milton's "Paradise Lost" would be greatly
improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it "more heroic
and sonorous than it is."

Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern
reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul?
This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English
literature.

BERGSON AND TELEPATHY

Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the
truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing,
it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a
belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every
moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among
magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings
have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity."

Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the
sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our
bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this
part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the
earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the
stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our
feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by
the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which
we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never
find out. Wireless messages may be continually goi