ideal commonwealth, did not pass a judgment from which there was to be no appeal. If good defence was made on her behalf, willing re-admittance was to be granted to Poetry; she was to be allowed to return from exile. And to those of her defenders,' he said, 'who are lovers of poetry, yet not poets, I think that we may grant a further privilege—they shall be allowed to speak in prose on her behalf; let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to states and to human life, and we will gladly listen; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers, I mean if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight.' The task imposed upon the critics is the same to-day. Let them show that poetry is not only pleasant but also useful to states and to human life. Believers in poetry share with all men the desire to make the best of life, but ideas of what in reality are the best things in life, and where teaching in regard to them may be found, differ very widely. Confidence in poetry arises from the belief that into the poetry of the world have entered the opinions of the wisest minds of the world as to what these best things are, and that thus to become acquainted with poetry is to take a sure step towards wisdom. In the effort to frame for ourselves a just philosophy of life many of us have found the most reliable guides among the poets, and in their company have passed not only the most happy, but also the most helpful, hours of our lives. To show how it is that poetry has produced this faith in itself, to make the interest in it deeper, fuller, and more intelligent, is the first duty of criticism; and an enquiry, however short and incomplete, into its nature, and the relation it bears to life, will therefore be serviceable as an introduction to the poetry of any particular era.

We may premise freely that a definition of poetry is im

possible. Definition implies complete analysis, and in the end there always remains something in poetry that escapes analysis. And this is so, because poetry is rooted in and springs from the soil of human nature, and has to do with that nature in its relation to the world, and as it is constituted, with all its elemental powers and affections, with its primary facts. That nature, however far back we press the enquiry, can never be fully explained, and poetry also evades complete analysis. Not, indeed, that, strictly speaking, poetry itself is insusceptible of complete exposition, but rather the conditions of human nature, upon which its existence depends. Its genesis and nature are as inexplicable as that of life itself, for life throbs in it. Like all the other arts, it is wholly an achievment of man, of his creative instinct. The things which are said to be done by Nature, are indeed done by divine art,' and in the spirit of man has, from the first, been present a joy in creation, which we may suppose is akin to that felt by the Architect of the universe. Man's effort to express and to perpetuate his ideas through various mediums has resulted in the arts. Directed through the medium of colour it has produced painting; through the medium of sound, music; through the medium of language, poetry. But before poetry came to be a developed art, long before any conscious effort was involved in its production, the impulse in which its springs are set uttered itself at sight of the wonder and beauty of Nature in half-articulate cry perhaps, or, aroused by keen joy or sorrow, in the spontaneous, vivid language of the feelings—an elemental or primitive song in the compass of a single gush of emotion.

Traced to its earliest beginnings, poetry is found associated with religious feeling. Into the dullest and

least imaginative minds, content or forced to travel the monotonous round of experience prescribed by tradition and habit, come at times flying gleams from a larger world of ideas, a world which lies beyond the horizon of their daily lives. To that world poetry, like religion, is an avenue. It is a world of intenser emotional, intenser intellectual, intenser spiritual life than the one in which we hourly move.

The impassioned language appropriate to these higher moods, elevated as much above ordinary language as the mood is elevated above ordinary moods, we speak of as poetical. When that language is metrically arranged, ordered or marshalled in a particular way, in a rhythmically effective way, we call it poetry.

In the childhood of races the only literature is poetical literature. Before the use of written symbols is known, while memory is the only library in which books can be stored, language, metrically ordered, is naturally, if not necessarily, resorted to as more easily borne in mind and less liable to undergo alteration in passing from mouth to mouth than language not so ordered. To the keeping of verse men entrusted their most cherished traditions, as well as their most sacred lore. Hence arose the idea that all poetry was inspired, that the poet was the speaker of divine oracles; and thus from before the dawn of history poetry has been indissolubly associated with the highest instincts of the race, and has come to be a record of the profoundest convictions of men, their dearest hopes, their intensest griefs, and their most divine dreams. The river of poetry, as it flowed, parted into three main streams. Its earliest forms were, no doubt, hymnal, employed in worship. Then would come funeral and marriage hymns, songs celebrating victory or bemoaning defeat. Stories told in a kind of chanted verse

would very early be popular, and wandering minstrels, who embodied in verse of their own manufacture tales of war, love, or adventure, would be welcome guests in all primitive societies. The elaboration of such stories into a long connected series, unified by their relation to one great hero or one important event, would result in the epic or narrative poem, such as the Iliad or Odyssey of Homer. The word epic, from its derivation (os, a word, a saying), denotes a poem distinguished from a lyric in that it was without the usual musical accompaniment, and was recited or chanted rather than sung. Thus, long before dramatic poetry came to the birth, lyric poetry, expressive of pure emotion, and narrative poetry, descriptive of persons, actions and events, were familiar, and held in high estimation. Poetry in its earliest forms was religious; and an enquiry into the origin of the drama discloses that this, an independent branch of poetry, also sprang from religion, and was originally, in its humble beginnings, part of the ritual of worship. The classic drama took its rise in the hymns sung in honour of the God, at the festival of Dionysus; the romantic in the tableaux of scriptural scenes presented at the Easter festival of the Christian Church.

In the opinion of Aristotle, poetry was a species of imitation. But he so spoke of it, because, in his mind, poetry and the Attic drama were almost interchangeable terms. The whole field of poetry was covered by Attic tragedy; its lyric parts were hardly less important than the speeches or dialogue by which the action proceeded, and epic narrative had its counterpart in the descriptive speeches of the messengera character indispensable to the Greek stage, whence tradition and a severe taste had combined to exclude violent or crowded spectacles. Surveying the Greek drama, and find

ing there an intermingling of lyric, epic and dramatic elements, Aristotle concluded that poetry was a species of imitation. And so in a sense it is; but as the mental horizon is pushed back, as the boundaries of knowledge are extended, the territories of poetry are widened. Pioneer poets explore the newly acquired lands of science or of philosophy, and the barren tracts, which at first promised nothing, are tilled, and made to bear poetic flower and fruit. Poetry does not deal with all the facts of which we may gain a knowledge. Piece after piece of knowledge is appropriated by the poet, and shown by him in its connexion with the moral, emotional or spiritual life; but in the outer intellectual court of our being must remain many facts which we acquire without emotion, and retain merely as conveniences. With general concepts rather than with particulars, and with such facts only as are susceptible of relation with the emotions, which connect themselves with the soul of man, can poetry deal. The condition of its existence is a vast and continually increasing body of such facts. We must never make the mistake that poetry is a chronicle of things instead of a chronicle of thought about things. When Wordsworth said, 'The poet thinks and feels in the spirit of human passions,' he meant that in the poet's mind thought was not disassociated from feeling-that his higher thoughts always tended to pass into the sphere of his feelings. And Tennyson has expressed the same idea when speaking of the poet. He said,—

'The viewless arrows of his thought were headed
And winged with flame.'

That is with the pure flame of emotion. Thus far regarding the material. But art, in which man imitates as far as in him