very hard indeed at poetry for seven or eight years, wrote little
else, and the published volumes form only a small part of my output,
which exists in many manuscript volumes. I achieved no particular
success. My little books were fairly well received, and I sold a few
hundred copies; I have even had a few pieces inserted in anthologies.
But though I have wholly deserted the practice of poetry, and though I
can by no means claim to be reckoned a poet, I do not in the least
regret the years I gave to it. In the first place it was an intense
pleasure to write. The cadences, the metres, the language, the
rhymes, all gave me a rapturous delight. It trained minute
observation--my poems were mostly nature-poems--and helped me to
disentangle the salient points and beauties of landscapes, hills,
trees, flowers, and even insects. Then too it is a very real training
in the use of words; it teaches one what words are musical, sonorous,
effective; while the necessity of having to fit words to metre
increases one's stock of words and one's power of applying them. When
I came back to writing prose, I found that I had a far larger and more
flexible vocabulary than I had previously possessed; and though the
language of poetry is by no means the same as that of prose--it is a
pity that the two kinds of diction are so different in English,
because it is not always so in other languages--yet it made the
writing of ornamental and elaborate prose an easier matter; it gave
one too a sense of form; a poem must have a certain balance and
proportion; so that when one who has written verse comes to write
prose, a subject falls easily into divisions, and takes upon itself a
certain order of course and climax.

But these are only consequences and resulting advantages. The main
reason for writing poetry is and must be the delight of doing it, the
rapture of perceiving a beautiful subject, and the pleasure of
expressing it as finely and delicately as one can. I have given it up
because, as William Morris once said of himself, "to make poetry just
for the sake of making it is a crime for a man of my age and
experience!"

One's feelings lose poetic flow
Soon after twenty-seven or so!

One begins to think of experience in a different sort of way, not as a
series of glowing points and pictures, which outline themselves
radiantly upon a duller background, but as a rich full thing, like a
great tapestry, all of which is important, if it is n