ing of poems as the
present finds argument for its worth in the brief extract with which
our _melange_ of opinions may well conclude. It is taken from a series
of articles in the New York _Independent_ on "A Theory of Poetry,"
by the Southern poet, Henry Timrod. Making a protest against the
limitation of taste and the poetic vision in certain directions,
instead of cultivating a broader range of taste, he says:

"I have known more than one young lover of poetry who read nothing but
Browning, and there are hundreds who have drowned all the poets of
the past and present in the deep music of Tennyson. But is it not
possible, with the whole wealth of literature at our command, to
attain views broad enough to enable us to do justice to genius of
every class and character? That certainly can be no true poetical
creed that leads directly to the neglect of those masterpieces which,
though wrought hundreds or thousands of years ago, still preserve the
freshness of perennial youth.... The injury [of such neglect] falls
only on such as slight them; and the penalty they pay is a contracted
and a contracting insight, the shutting on them forever of many
glorious vistas of mind, and the loss of thousands of images of grace
and grandeur.

"Oh! rest assured that there are no stereotyped forms of poetry. It
is a vital power, and may assume any guise and take any shape, at
one time towering like an Alp in the darkness and at another sunning
itself in the bell of a tulip or the cup of a lily; and until one
shall have learned to recognize it in all its various developments he
has no right to echo back the benison of Wordsworth:

"'Blessings be on them and eternal praise,
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight in heavenly lays.'"

* * * * *

By no means, then, to attempt a new definition where so many more
competent have failed, we may nevertheless gather some points of
certainty from the opinions cited above.

Poetry concerns itself with the ideal and the emotional, in nature,
life, and thought. Its language must be choice, for aptness of
expression and for melodious sound. Its form will embody the
recurrence of rhythmic measures, which, however elaborated and varied
in later times, originated in the dim past, when singing and dancing
moved hand in hand for the vivid utterance of feeling--in mirthful joy
and in woe, love and hate, worshipful devotion and mortal