ee, a
reviler of common laws and duties, the slave of his own private
judgment, who prophesies out of his own heart, and hath seen nothing
but only the appearances of things distorted and coloured by
"genius." Heaven send the word, with many more, a speedy burial!

And what becomes of artistic form in the hands of such a school?
Just what was to be expected. It is impossible to give outward form
to that which is in its very nature formless, like doubt and
discontent. For on such subjects thought itself is not defined; it
has no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic law. And
in a poem, as in all else, the body must be formed according to the
law of the inner life; the utterance must be the expression, the
outward and visible antetype of the spirit which animates it. But
where the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express itself
in form, for form is that which has limits. Where it has no inward
unity it cannot have any outward one. If the spirit be impatient of
all moral rule, its utterance will be equally impatient of all
artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from
experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those
forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest--
tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical
ode. For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to
us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they
require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, and a
verbal polish even more complete than any other form of poetic
utterance. But where there is no melody within, there will be no
melody without. It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual
discords to physical music. The mere practical patience and self-
restraint requisite to work out rhythm when fixed on, will be
wanting; nay, the fitting rhythm will never be found, the subject
itself being arhythmic; and thus we shall have, or, rather, alas! do
have, a wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater and
greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical
utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the
older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad,
diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that in
which it happens to have been written would have been equally
appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate. Where men have
not