rid the world of a nuisance. On the other hand, when a thought
or a feeling is to be communicated from a mind profoundly stirred,
exalted, filled with fervour, or from a mind tingling with exquisite
perceptions, then there can be no true and full communication to
another mind, unless that mind also is stirred, exalted or made to
tingle. Music can so dispose that other mind. So too can language; for,
under the influence of poetry of perfect sound, we find stealing over
us, thanks largely _to_ the sound, a mood which could never result from
prose; and so our minds are polarized to feel the actual thing expressed
exactly as the writer feels it, to see it exactly as he sees it.
Verse-poetry, therefore, is no idle invention. It has its sound
philosophical basis; and where poetry is really demanded by the subject,
it is part and parcel of the supreme literary gift to wed the music of
the verse so aptly to the thought, that the communication from soul to
soul is utterly complete.

Is verse a mere conviction? Let us see. Does any one pretend that his
spirit would be just as much moved by the mere sense of this passage of
Tennyson, if it were stripped of its verse form and turned into prose:--

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

and--

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

If he does, let us not envy him his powers of perception or sensation.

Would you feel for Coleridge just the same mood of sympathy, if he told
you his sad case in prose, as when he writes:--

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,
In word or sigh or tear.

Listen once more to this:--

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers--
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.
The young lambs are bleating in the meadows;
The young birds are chirping in the nest;
The young fawns are playing with the shadows;
The young flowers are blowing toward the west--
But