glorious vistas of mind, and the loss of thousands of images of grace
and grandeur.

"Oh! rest assured that there are no stereotyped forms of poetry. It
is a vital power, and may assume any guise and take any shape, at
one time towering like an Alp in the darkness and at another sunning
itself in the bell of a tulip or the cup of a lily; and until one
shall have learned to recognize it in all its various developments he
has no right to echo back the benison of Wordsworth:

"'Blessings be on them and eternal praise,
The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
Of truth and pure delight in heavenly lays.'"

* * * * *

By no means, then, to attempt a new definition where so many more
competent have failed, we may nevertheless gather some points of
certainty from the opinions cited above.

Poetry concerns itself with the ideal and the emotional, in nature,
life, and thought. Its language must be choice, for aptness of
expression and for melodious sound. Its form will embody the
recurrence of rhythmic measures, which, however elaborated and varied
in later times, originated in the dim past, when singing and dancing
moved hand in hand for the vivid utterance of feeling--in mirthful joy
and in woe, love and hate, worshipful devotion and mortal defiance,
the fierceness of battle and the serenity of peace. While through all
and over all must breathe the informing spirit of Beauty--whether
of the delicate or the sublime, whether of sweetness or of