craftsman who can use all the intricate resources of good prose
successfully to create an illusion that he is inspired in his least
abandoned moments, it is child's play to use the more obvious devices
of the metrician to similar effect. So far as mere formal excellence
is concerned, verse is a journeyman's matter as compared with prose;
and it is not at all astonishing to find that the formal part of poetry
troubles Mr Kipling not at all. But we must look beyond the formality
of verse to find a poet. Poetry flies higher than prose only when the
poet's feeling has driven him to sing what he cannot say. Mr Kipling
is a wonderful metrician; but that is not the question. The question
is, Where shall we find the most immediate union of the author's
feeling with the author's expression? And the answer to that will be,
Not in the author's poems.

Take as an example the English motive:

"See you our little mill that clacks,
So busy by the brook?
She has ground her corn and paid her tax
Ever since Domesday Book."

Compare this well-wrought stanza with the prose tale _Below the Mill
Dam_, or with the passage it paraphrases in the story to which it
stands as motto:

"The English are a bold people. His Saxons would laugh and jest with
Hugh, and Hugh with them, and--this was marvellous to me--if even the
meanest of them said such and such a thing was the Custom of the Manor,
then straightway would Hugh and such old men of the Manor as might be
near forsake everything else to debate the matter--I have seen them