te for the hope
of plunder. When the foot-falls are audible, as on the deck of a
steamer, walking has an added pleasure, and even the pirate, with gentle
consideration for the universal instinct, suffers his vanquished foeman
to walk the plank.

Dancing is simply marking time with the body, as an accompaniment to
music, though the same--without the music--is done with only the head
and forefinger in a New England meeting-house at psalm time. (The
peculiar dance named in honor of St. Vitus is executed with or without
music, at the option of the musician.) But the body is a clumsy piece of
machinery, requiring some attention and observation to keep it
accurately in time to the fiddling. The smallest diversion of the
thought, the briefest relaxing of the mind, is fatal to the performance.
'Tis as easy to fix attention on a sonnet of Shakspeare while working at
whist as gloat upon your partner while waltzing. It can not be
intelligently, appreciatively, and adequately accomplished--_crede
expertum_.

On the subject of poetry, Emerson says: "Metre begins with pulse-beat,
and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the
inhalation and exhalation of the lungs," and this really goes near to
the root of the matter; albeit we might derive therefrom the unsupported
inference that a poet "fat and scant of breath" would write in lines of
a foot each, while the more able-bodied bard, with the capacious lungs
of a pearl-diver, would deliver himself all across his page, with "the
spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon."

While the heart, working with alternate contraction and dilatation,
sends the blood intermittently through the brain, and the outer world
apprises us of its existence only by successive impulses, it must result
that our sense of things will be rhythmic. The brain being alternately
stimulated and relaxed we must think--as we feel--in waves, apprehending
nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not
divisible into units of perception of which we make mental record and
physical sign. That is why we dance. That is why we can, may, must,
will, and shall dance, and the gates of Philistia shall not prevail
against us.

La valse legere, la valse legere,
The free, the bright, the debonair,
That stirs the strong, and fires the fair
With joy like wine of vintage rare--
That lends the swiftly circling pair
A short surcease of killing care,
With music i