upport the ecstasy, and
merely 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 after year, week
after week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshness
grow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have
all been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's
_Elegy_, and much of _Hamlet_, and some of Burns's songs, have been
manipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they are
like rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the
script of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards who
wish to speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In
several of the literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, or
struggled long against great disadvantages--it is still possible to
produce pleasure by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly
limpid language. But with us in England, I confess that it seems to me
certain that whatever we retain, we can never any more have patience to
listen to a new shepherd piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation
is likely to be more acutely preoccupied than the last with the desire
for novelty of expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, which
is so fervently demanded from every new school of writers, will force
the poets of the future to sweep away all recognised impressions. The
consequence must be, I think--I confess so far as language is concerned
that I see no escape from this--that the natural uses of English and the
obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our national poetry, as
they are even now so generally being driven.

No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive to
write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever.
The poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in their
hands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never