provinces which cultivate a national speech, will long find a great
facility in expressing themselves in verse. I observe that it has recently
been stated that Wales, which has always teemed with vernacular poets, has
never possessed so many as she does at this time. I am debarred by what
Keats called 'giant ignorance' from expressing an opinion on the subject,
but I presume that in Welsh the resources of language are far from being
so seriously exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own
complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher forms of
poetic diction through five centuries has made simple expression extremely
difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and
in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic art
untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nineteenth century,
Provencal poets capable of producing simple and thrilling numbers which
are out of the reach of their sophisticated brethren who employ the worn
locutions of the French language.

In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to occur less
description of plain material objects, because the aspect of these has
already received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail to
be less precise enumeration of the primitive natural emotions, because
this also has been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not any
longer satisfy to write

The rose is red, the violet blue,
And both are sweet, and so are you.

Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and they were so
still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth were young. But it is quite
impossible that we should ever go back to them. Future poets will seek to
analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of art
become mechanical and insipid, and even their _naivetes_ lose their
savour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now be
written to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shape
or another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and that Pegasus,
with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continue to
accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will only be
at the cost of much that we at present admire and like that the continuity
of the art of verse will be pres