is better, a sentence from the pen of a living divine, which is an example of true prose rhythm, and all pure English words:

"The land that is very far off—it can be no other than the heavenly country, for love of which God's elect have lived as strangers in the earth—a land far away, over a long path of many years, up weary mountains, and through deep broken ways, full of perils and of pit-falls; through sicknesses and weariness, sorrows and burdens, and the valley of the shadow of death; world-worn and foot-sore, they have been faring forth, one by one, since the world began, 'going and weeping.'"*

There is no appearance of art in this sentence; but the highest art could not more truly make choice and combination of its words.

I must hasten to the powers of the language in verse; and, in the first place, let me say that it is a happy trait. in our literature that it has no peculiar poetic diction. Words that are used in good prose are not excluded from poetry, and words which the poets employ belong also to our prose uses of speech and writing; and hence the poets are the better enabled to exert a perpetual influence in the fulfilment of their high function of conservators of the purity of the language. Our prosody, taking accent rather than quantity for its principle, seldom if ever, disqualifies words on account of their sound, whereas in the Latin, as has been ascertained, one word out of every eight is excluded from its chief metres by the rules of its prosody. An analysis of a passage from Cicero, the elevated prose of the language, for this purpose, has proved

* Manning's Sermons, vol. iii. p. 432.

that, in fifty lines, thirty words are impossible words for the most usual forms of Latin verse.

The study of English poetry, being in closer affinity with the prose, admits of an important use in the formation of a good prose style. A mind as earnestly practical as Dr. Franklin's observed this, and he recommended the study of poetry and the writing of verse for this very purpose it was one of the sources of his own excellent English. It is a species of early training for prosewriting which he recommended, having recognised it in his own case as having given a genuine copiousness and command of language. This certainly is worth reflection, too, that all the great English poets, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, Cowper, Byron, Southey, and Wordsworth, have displayed high power as prose-writers.

It is sometimes supposed that the laws of metrical language must, of necessity, produce a style more or less artificial, and therefore alien from prose uses; but the very opposite is the fact. The true poet is always a true artist, and words are the instruments of his art. The laws of metre are no bondage to him, but genial self-control; he asks less license of language than any one, and the constraint of rhyme will often increase and not lessen the precision and clearness of expression. It is, in truth, one of the cases which prove the great moral truth, that willing obedience gains for itself unwonted power: submitting to the control of his art, bowing to its laws with happy loyalty, the poet's reward is the endowment of an ampler command of expression and of the music of the language. Verse and metre are wings, and not fetters, to the true poet.

Observe the matchless English everywhere in Shaks peare-how free it is with all the art that is to be discovered in it; how true it is, and full of beautiful and almost familiar simplicity! If, in the recollection of any passage, a word shall escape your memory, you may hunt through the thirty-eight thousand words in the language, and no word shall fit the vacant place but the one that the poet put there. Take that exquisite lament of the banished Norfolk over his native English: the words are all simple, homely words, such as anybody might use, (for Shakspeare never made his language "too bright or good for human nature's daily food.") Notice, too, if you can do so without impairing the general effect, that there are in the passage no fewer than eight alliterations:

"A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,

And all unlook'd for from your highness' mouth;
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim

As to be cast forth in the common air,

Have I deserved at your highness' hand.

The language I have learn'd these forty years,

My native English, now I must forego:

And now my tongue's use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or a harp;

Or like a cunning instrument cas'd up,

Or, being open, put into his hands,

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now."

Or turn to those beautiful sentences in Coriolanus, where the Roman hero, returning with wounds and victory, 18 met by his exulting mother and his silent, weeping wife:

"My gracious silence, hail!

Would'st thou have laugh'd, had I come toffin'd home,

That weep'st to see me triumph? Ah, my dear,

Such eyes the widows in Corioli wear,

And mothers that lack sons."

Or, to take what is not so much used by Shakspeare, the rhymed poetry in Love's Labour's Lost:

"These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,
That give a name to every fixed star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk, and wot not what they are."

How true is it what Coleridge said, "that you might as well think of pushing a brick out of a wall with your forefinger, as attempt to remove a word out of any of the finished passages of Shakspeare."*

To show the wonderful power of expression that belongs to poetry, under even the most severe laws of verse, what mere prose-writer or reader would suppose it possible, within the narrow limit of fourteen lines, and with all the complex structure and redoubled rhymes of the sonnet, for a poet to speak of no fewer than seven of the illustrious poets of modern Europe, and to touch upon their characters and the story of their lives; and yet this has been achieved, apparently without effort-so natural is the flow of the language-in that well-known sonnet of Wordsworth, wherein he at once defends and illustrates that form of composition :

"Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key

Shakspeare unlock'd his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;

*Table Talk, vol. ii., p. 211.

A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoens soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle-leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,
It cheer'd mild Spenser, called from Faëry-land

To struggle through dark ways, and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand

The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!"

It is the poets who have best revealed the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon-English words-the monosyllabic music of our language. This was one of the secrets of the charm and the popularity of Lord Byron's poetry-his eminently English choice of words. Two short passages of Mr. Landor's Poems will serve to show the metrical effect of simple words of one syllable. In the sentence I am about to quote, out of thirty such words, there is but one long latinized word-the rest are nearly all monosyllables, the last line wholly so:

"She was sent forth

To bring that light which never wintry blast
Blows out, nor rain, nor snow extinguishes-
The light that shines from loving eyes upon

Eyes that love back, till they can see no more."

The next will better exemplify the harmonious combination of the simple English and the classical or Southern words.

"Crush thy own heart, Man! but fear to wound

The gentler, that relies on thee alone,

By thee created, weak or strong by thee;

* Landor's Works, vol. ii, p. 480. Hellenics viii.