een not
only permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing."
Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and
you will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his
philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical
verse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry
out of the living language of his country, had been one of the most
skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay our alarm.
There cannot be any lasting force in arguments which remind us of the
pious confessions of a redeemed burglar. It needs more than the zeal of
a turncoat to drive Apollo out of Parnassus.

There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetry
written and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character of
it? There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingenious
water-colour painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It
is very fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus,
the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his
wings, against a sky so dark that it must symbolise the obscure
discourse of those who write in prose. You are left quite doubtful
whether he will strike the rocky terrace in the foreground with his
slender, silver hooves, or will swoop down into the valley below, or
will soar to heaven and out of sight. You are left by the painter in a
pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may break out anywhere, and of the
vivacious courser himself all that we can be sure of is that we are
certain to see him alighting before us when we least expect him.

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through his
apparently aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poetical
spirit, and yet acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way of
believing that verse will continue to be written in the English language
for a quite indefinite period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two of
these difficulties at once. The principal danger, then, to the future of
poetry seems to me to rest in the necessity of freshness of expression.
Every school of verse is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because
its leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive expression;
its crest is some writer, or several writers, of genius, who combine
skill and fire and luck at a moment of extreme opportuneness; and then
the wave breaks, because later writers cannot s