as certainly if the following passage had been printed
merely as prose, in a book which professed to be nothing
else, no one would have suspected that it was composed
of an agglutination of lines.

"The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining
eyes, and see below them earth and men. They see Tiresias
sitting staff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his
robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the
doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens
of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe
the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and
heads reared proudly, snuffing the mountain wind. They
see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his
wheeled house at noon; he tethers his beast down and
makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the
embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains
stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock
and flag-leaved isis flowers."

No one will deny that this is fine imaginative painting,
and as such poetical,--but it is the poetry of well
written, elegant prose. Instead of the recurring sounds,
whether of rhyme or similarly weighted syllables, which
constitute the outward form of what we call verse, we
have the careless grace of uneven, undulating sentences,
flowing on with a rhythmic cadence indeed, but free
from all constraint of metre or exactitude of form. It
may be difficult, perhaps it is impossible, to fix the
measure of license which a poet may allow himself