e the Psalms--all of these as rendered in our Authorised
Version of Holy Writ--are all of these poetry? Well 'yes,' if you want my
opinion; and again 'yes,' I am sure. But truly on this field, though
scores of great men have fought across it--Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge,
Scaliger (I pour the names on you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the
two Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, Corneille, Goethe,
Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Emerson, Hegel, Gummere--but our axles grow
hot. Let us put on the brake: for in practice the dispute comes to very
little: since literature is an art and treats scientific definitions as
J. K. Stephen recommended. From them

It finds out what it cannot do,
And then it goes and does it.

I am journeying, say, in the West of England. I cross a bridge over a
stream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful
in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty: yet nothing happened as I
stepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of
no change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and I
shall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. But at
what turn of the road this will happen, just how long the small
multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into
conviction--that nobody can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. They
are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land which a De
Quincey or a Whitman or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I advise
you who are beginners to keep well one side or other of the frontier,
remembering that there is plenty of room and what happened to Tupper.

If we restrict ourselves to the terms 'verse' and 'prose,' we shall find
the line much easier to draw. Verse is memorable speech set down in metre
with strict rhythms; prose is memorable speech set down without
constraint of metre and in rhythms both lax and various--so lax, so
various, that until quite recently no real attempt has been made to
reduce them to rule. I doubt, for my part, if they can ever be reduced to
rule; and after a perusal of Professor Saintsbury's latest work, "A
History of English Prose Rhythm," I am left doubting. I commend this book
to you as one that clears up large patches of forest. No one has yet so
well explained what our prose writers, generation after generation, have
tried to do with prose: and he has, by the way, furnished us with a
capital anthology--or, as he pu