apply
without some illuminating response, recommends that "Qui saura penser de
lui-meme et former de nobles idees, qu'il prenne, s'il pent, la maniere
et le tour eleve des maitres." These are words which should inspire
every new aspirant to the laurel. "S'il peut"; you see that Vauvenargues
puts it so, because he does not wish that we should think that such
victories as these are easy, or that any one else can help us to produce
them. They are not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by the
rubbed-out, conventionalised coinage of our language.

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples and the
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 v