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THE POETRY OF THE FUTURE.

PRELIMINARY.

The main aim of the following pages is to show that the one essential characteristic of verse-the language of poetry-in English is Rhythm.

This conclusion involves a rejection of the ordinary stanza and metre, and of terminal rhyme, so far as it is used merely or mainly to mark the endings of verses.

In order to reach this end it will be necessary to enquire antecedently what poetry itself is, and its probable future; to consider, very incidentally, the relations between poetry and music; and to state carefully and somewhat in detail several points in the art, of verse-making.

THE POETICAL. The first step in our antecedent enquiry into what Poetry is, is to devote a moment to the Poetical-that which lies behind the utterance whose form we are to consider. The Poetical is the domain of Poetry. It comprehends all that Poetry attempts to utter.

Without designing or even desiring in any way to challenge the received principlesconceding there to be some general agreement among authors on this matter, which, however, we do not undertake to do-we wish to state, as distinctly and as succinctly as we can, what we conceive the Poetical to be. To do this there will be no need of reviewing the numerous, diverse, and often conflicting theories of the thousand-and-one writers, from Plato to Taine, who have told us, and told us so much, about the Beautiful, the Good, the True, the Picturesque, the Sublime, the Ideal, and, finally, about the Poetical. All that Artistotle, Lessing, Schiller, Cousin, Ruskin, and the rest, have said about these things may rest just where they left itwhich, by the way, in many if not most cases, was pretty much where they found itinasmuch as this inquiry is traced from a different starting-point, as well as viewed from a different stand-point. Besides, in the discussion of a matter largely incidental, there can be no need for any such exhaustive and exhausting process

THE BEAUTIFUL. -The relation between the Beautiful and Beauty on the one hand, and the Poetical and Poetry on the other, has generally been seen, when seen at all, vaguely; that is to say, seen as the Beautiful and the Poetical themselves have been seen"in a mirror darkly." This indistinctness seems to have grown out of the faulty views of nature taken by the speculators. Let us merely state in brief our opinions upon this subject; and more than this is not practicable here, for the reason that to prove or even to fully illustrate them would require the space of a volume, differing, as they do, radically from the holdings and the provings of most writers-it is probably safe to say, of all the authoritative writers-in this field.

In brief, then, Nature is an effect-a product-of a Power lying behind or above it; and it stands, accordingly, to that Power in the relation of an effect to a cause. That cause we shall describe as Spiritual; the effect, as Natural. The Natural, or Nature, is the material universe embracing the three. kingdoms known as mineral, vegetable, and animal.

To those who deny this idea of matter being an effect of spiritual causes, we put the proposition in this way:

There lies behind every natural object a power-creative energy or force, if you prefer-which operates consistently with the idea of cause and effect; that when an acorn results in an oak, it does so in conformity to a law that is uniform and invariable, the oak never happening to be a pine or a maple; that this germ-energy or force does not originate in the acorn, but in the cause of the acorn, or in something behind or above it; and that, consequently, whether we call it— that force-a spiritual cause producing a natural effect, or a force operating in nature, the relation is equally perfect, equally exact, equally scientific, and equally trustworthy, whether we judge of the effect by the cause or of the cause by the effect. One is at least as trustworthy illustration of the other, as the photograph of a man is of the man himself.

Our use for the idea of a relation is this: There must be also a strict similarity between a cause and its effect-whether we call them, with Plato, archetype, (paradeigma,) and ma

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