Paradise_, who confesses his own modest aims in words
like these:--

Of heaven or hell I have no power to sing;
I cannot ease the burden of your fears,
Or make quick-coming death a little thing,
Or bring again the pleasure of past years,
Nor for my words shall ye forget your tears,
Or hope again for aught that I can say,
The idle singer of an empty day.

But rather, when aweary of your mirth,
From full hearts still unsatisfied ye sigh,
And, feeling kindly unto all the earth,
Grudge every minute as it passes by,
Made the more mindful that the sweet days die,
Remember me a little then, I pray,
The idle singer of an empty day.

Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time,
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
Let it suffice me that my murmuring rhyme
Beat with light wing against the ivory gate,
Telling a tale not too importunate
To those who in the sleepy region stay,
Lulled by the singer of an empty day.

We have dealt with the poet's place in the world of growing scientific
light. We might also treat of the poet's place in the world of social
progress. But he is a bold man who will prophesy whither society is
tending. To some of us, its evolution has no terrors. But, whatever be
the course of institutions, whatever the changing shapes of the social
organism, there is one conviction we may most firmly hold. It is that,
as ecstasies of love and grief, hope and fear, joy and suffering, must
still exist, so the poet will ever exist to give them utterance. The
drama, the lyric, the elegy, can never be effete so long as men have
hearts and feel with them.

But why, it may be asked, should all this exquisite expression of nature
and man and life take shape in verse? Why should we not, with Carlyle,
declare verse out of date, an artificial thing, which expresses under
crippling encumbrances what could be expressed in prose more clearly and
more truthfully? To this question we may reply that rhymes and
recurrences of equal syllables are indeed no essentials of true poetry.
Poetry has existed without them, and will exist without them. But, if
not rhymes and equal syllables, yet rhythm and melody, moving
concurrences of sounds, must for all time be elements of poetic
utterance. The reason should be manifest. There is an indefinable
sympathy between the spoken sound and the conceiving mood of the poet.
The poet conceives in moments of unusual sensibility, his mental par