with a
certain measure of alarm on the excess of verbiage about versification
which attends not merely criticism--for that matters little--but the
actual production and creation. I am confident, however, that the common
sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in favour of sanity
and lucidity.

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected style
into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity
and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful
masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the
poetry of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, what
the French call "la vraie hauteur." This elevation of style, this
dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the
rude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it
degenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved by
flatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of
empty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of the
seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century--especially
in the other countries of Europe, for England was never without some dew
on the threshing-floor--if we examine it in France, for instance,
between Racine and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognise that it
was very rarely both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival,
which we are beginning ungratefully to decry, did at least restore to
poetry the sense of a genuine stateliness of expression, which once more
gave it the requisite dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and
the noble sentiments of humanity.

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the form to the
subjects with which the poetry of the future is likely to be engaged.
Here we are confronted with the fact that, if we examine the whole of
history, we see that the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed
by the incursions of a more and more powerful and wide embracing prose.
At the dawn of civilisation poetry had it all its own way. If
instruction was desired upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy,
the bard produced it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignity
of form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thus
you conceive of a Hesiod before you think of a Homer, and the earliest
poetry was probably of a purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose,
with its exact pedestrian