52 
The world is full of poetry,—the air 
Is living with its spirit, and the waves 
Dance to the music of its melodies, 
And sparkle in its brightness. 
There is a doubtful tendency even in the very forms used by a 
host of the versifiers of our day. They are little else than 
prosodists or mere verse formers, with their Triolets, their 
Rondeaus, and their Ballades, and one knows not what; and, 
indeed, little besides do they give than what Horace in his day 
termed ‘‘ verses devoid of substance, melodious trifles.”’ Such 
compositions are only put forth when the versifier is on the verge 
of poetical bankruptcy, or before he has arrived at the years of 
poetical discretion. ‘The last is the sort of condition Tennyson 
was in, when, ‘‘ by a mossed brookbank on a stone,’ he wrote 
in an album of the ‘“‘ Sad, sweet, strange no more.” Of course 
Lord Tennyson never perpetrates such things now, but we 
cannot forget that he nearly approached it in the lines which 
begin, ‘‘I stood on a tower in the wet.’ When the poet is 
wedded to mere form it is a sign that he lacks genuine interest 
in humanity. Surely the time is ripe for protest against a band 
of rhymsters whose thought has run out so thin that it has to 
be done up into all sorts of fancy shapes to catch the eyes of the 
world. 
Some of our modern poetry, apart altogether from its form, is 
in its matter of very doubtful tendency. The languid, indolent, 
dilettante sensuousness, and the Paphian idolization of material 
beauty, as found in some of the effusions of Rossetti, Swinburne, 
Whitman, and some of their followers give lurid illustration of this 
tendency. Indeed some of those followers out-herod Herod 
himself. Our earlier poets were pretty free of speech, but there 
was no pretence about them, whereas some of our modern ones, 
the fleshly poets, as Robert Buchanan dubbed them, make their 
influence all the more doubtful by inference and innuendo. 
They give us the poetry of passion, as they term it, and it is 
photographic even to the most microscopical minuteness. Now 
the poetry which is the mere offspring of passion is mostly of a 
debasing character, while that which is born of real heartfulness 
ennobles and uplifts. We are sometimes troubled that our 
young people should be subjected to the influence of the sensa- 
tional stories so common in our day, but one poem, if its tone 
be in the wrong direction, will do more harm than a hundred 
story supplements. In itself, and when rightly directed, the 
poetry of passion is altogether good, for, as Lowell, in ‘ An 
Incident in a Railroad Car,” put it, 
Never did poesy appear 
So full of heaven to me as when 
I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear 
To the lives of coarsest men, 
