ther, by imperceptible gradations, and their recurrence to depend
entirely on the emotions conveyed in the subject words. Just so,
poetry employs a confined and arbitrary metre, and a periodic
recurrence of sounds which disappear gradually in its higher forms of
the ode and the drama, till the poetry at last passes into prose, a
free and ever-shifting flow of every imaginable rhythm and metre,
determined by no arbitrary rules, but only by the spiritual intent of
the subject. The same will hold good of whole prose compositions,
when compared with whole poems.

Prose then is highest. To write a perfect prose must be your
ultimate object in attending these lectures; but we must walk before
we can run, and walk with leading-strings before we can walk alone,
and such leading-strings are verse and rhyme. Some tradition of this
is still kept up in the practice of making boys write Latin and Greek
verses at school, which is of real service to the intellect, even
when most carelessly employed, and which, when earnestly carried out,
is one great cause of the public school and University man's
superiority in style to most self-educated authors. And why should
women's writings be in any respect inferior to that of men, if they
are only willing to follow out the same method of self-education?

Do not fancy, when I say that we must learn poetry before we learn
prose, that I am only advancing a paradox; mere talking is no more
prose than mere rhyme is poetry. Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's
comedy, makes, I suspect, a very great mistake, when he tells his
master: "If that means prose, I've been talking prose all my life."
I fancy the good man had been no more talking prose, than an awkward
country boy has been really walking all his life, because he has been
contriving somehow to put one leg before the other. To see what
walking is, we must look at the perfectly-drilled soldier, or at the
perfectly-accomplished lady, who has been taught to dance in order
that she may know how to walk. Dancing has been well called the
poetry of motion; but the tender grace, the easy dignity in every
gesture of daily life which the perfect dancer exhibits answers
exactly to that highly-organised prose which ought to be the
offspring of a critical acquaintance with poetry. Milton's matchless
prose style, for instance, grows naturally from his matchless power
over rhyme and metre. Practice in versification might be unnecessary
if we were all