all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better
part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with
disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the
mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little
seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to germinate and
produce some fruit.

And, therefore, this Society meets to study literature, and, as I said
at the beginning, it meets to study in a spirit which is open-minded,
grateful, and docile.

The Future of Poetry

A thoughtful friend of mine--but one who withal affects a philistinism
which I know to be only skin-deep--is fond of assuring me that "poetry"
can no longer justify its existence, that the world of the future will
regard it as a trifling and artificial thing, and that therefore serious
men will cease to devote themselves either to producing it or to reading
it. In our discussions upon the subject, I have asked him whether he
merely means that men will cease to compose verses, or whether he
believes that "the poetry" is actually going out of life and literature,
and that the imaginative and emotional way of looking at things, which
belongs to "poetry," will give place to the rigidly philosophical and
practical. He answers, of course, that men will continue to have
ardours, aspirations, joys, sorrows, and sympathies, which they will and
must express as vividly as they can, to their own relief and to the
solace or encouragement of their fellow-men; but he asserts that all
this can be done in prose, and will be done in prose, seeing that rhymes
and regular numbers of syllables are a sort of primitive barbarian
device, mechanical, cramping, and, in a certain way, productive of
untruth. When we press this latter point, it is admitted that prose
itself is capable of inexhaustible rhythms and magnificent melodies, and
that these qualities show signs of being more and more developed, more
and more adapted to the mood and sentiment of that which is to be
expressed. When we get thus far, it appears that we have been very much
in agreement all along. To me--and by this time, I hope, to him--poetry
is nothing else but this same impassioned expression of ardour and
emotion, sensibility and imagination, no matter whether the form it
takes be obviously regulated verse or subtly rhythmic "prose."

But, when we have reached our agreement, there are others who confront
us with that t