f a turncoat to drive Apollo out of
Parnassus.

There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetry
written and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character of it?
There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingenious water-colour
painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It is very
fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus, the horse
of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his wings, against
a sky so dark that it must symbolize the obscure discourse of those who
write in prose. You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the
rocky terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves, or will
swoop down into the valley below, or will soar to heaven and out of sight.
You are left by the painter in a pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may
break out anywhere, and of the vivacious courser himself all that we can
be sure of is that we are certain to see him alighting before us when we
least expect him.

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through his apparently
aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poetical spirit, and yet
acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way of believing that verse
will continue to be written in the English language for a quite indefinite
period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two of these difficulties at
once. The principal danger, then, to the future of poetry seems to me to
rest in the necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse is
a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its leaders have become
capable of new forms of attractive expression; its crest is some writer,
or several writers, of genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a
moment of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks, because later
writers cannot support the ecstasy, and only repeat formulas which have
lost their attractiveness. Shirley would have been a portent, if he had
flourished in 1595 and had written then as he did in 1645. Erasmus Darwin
would be one of the miracles of prosody if 'The Loves of the Plants' could
be dated 1689 instead of 1789. There must always be this fluctuation, this
rise and fall in value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of the
trough of the last is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression.
_Cantate Domino_ is the cry of youth, sing a _new_ song unto the Lord.

But with the superabundant circulation of language year a