ty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that it
was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
perhaps eternal.

Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
Le['o]n; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
revolutionists.

The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a
high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear
for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the
use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but
they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she
has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and
even splendid. But there are others!

It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read
Coventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House"
which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as the
proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The
Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and
Sleep," one of the most musical poems in our language.

How strange at night the bay
Of dogs, how wild the note
Of cocks that scream for day,
In homesteads far remote;
How strange and wild to hear
The old and crumbling tower,
Amid the darkness, suddenly
Take tongue and speak the hour!

Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime,
it is plain--as the form of poetry appeals to the ear--that the rime is
a gain. Yet one does not miss it in