all-pervading, we are ready to assert and to do our best to prove; but in this discussion we have no reference to that utilitarianism, and beg leave to dismiss it finally just here and now.

What, then, do we mean by "use?" We mean the final cause of every intelligent action of which man is capable. We hold that man's intelligence shapes his actions, and that that is moved by his affections or motives. Without an affection or motive no man ever does anything; and what is done, as well as how the action proceeds, is directed by his intelligence. Motives move man; intelligence guides him, and use rewards him. All happiness is derived from use. Every love regards use as its end. The universe is a theatre of uses. The Hereafter is a Kingdom of uses. All real life is energy directed to use. Men, angels, demons-all contribute to the grand use of the universe. It follows that every channel of legitimate energy and activity leads to use, and thither only; and that use can be reached in no other ways. The channel may be science, sentiment, art, purity of life, hope, prayer; it leads they all lead

-in the daylight of Divine wisdom, to uses, intermediate ones first and finally to ultimate use. Whoever, therefore, lifts a spirit with a beautiful thought, be the theme how ethereal soever it may, is contributing to use, just as substantially as the scientist or the inventor who discovers a law or invents a machine is. Are we utilitarian, then?

The spirit of resistance to mere forms-in ecclesiastics the power of forms is called formalism-is the outgrowth of the conviction that beauty has as definite and as invariable aims and ends as duty or labor has. We have indicated our belief that the final cause of beauty is to spiritualize man by lifting him out of his selfishness. This we wish to emphasize, because upon it rests the validity of all that we have to urge in behalf of making use the criterion of all human aims. We hold, then, that the final cause of our present life is preparation for a future spiritual life; that every agency, power and faculty here looks to that preparation; and that, consequently, beauty, with its utterances and influences, be they through nature or by art, is essentially and exclusively a useful thing.

How? It elevates and spiritualizes man, thereby bettering him and preparing him for his future life. It prepares him immediately for this life and mediately for the next.

To those who claim that the final cause of beauty or of poetry or of anything else is mere pleasure-pleasure, that is to say, without its elevating and spiritualizing effects— pleasure per se-we have little to say; for the reason, mainly, that it is well-nigh incredible that any earnest man seriously entertains such a belief. It may be worth while, however, to mention another meaning of the word pleasure which may get itself confounded with the one just stated. Pleasure, it may not be unsafe to assume, is the final cause of the whole scheme of the universe-pleasure to the Infinite Creator and to the finite creatures; but that is an idea so infinitely higher than the one above objected to, that surely our little Epicureans cannot mean that.

We return from the digression. Authority, as we have stated, is almost absolute in literary matters generally, but especially in regard to literary forms. From the earliest days to this, that power has been growing

feebler and feebler. In the matter immediately before us-the language of poetryprogress in breaking down the autocracy of Authority has been, as is usual with this kind of progress, like that of a rising tide-in waves that rise and recede, but the general result is an onward movement.

It is not a part of our plan to trace this progress in detail. Nor do we propose to trace the history of the stanza, rhyme, and other adventitious features. We propose to touch upon each of these only as it may seem necessary in order to bring us to our conclusion, namely, that they are adventitious features.

In holding that rhythm is the one essential feature of verse we hold, of course, that the other usually-considered-essential features are adventitious.

Let us now proceed to consider these socalled elements-these adventitious features. They are, somewhat in the order of their importance, these:

1. Metre.

2. Stanza.

3. Rhyme.

4. Alliteration.

5. Iteration and Echo.

6. Onomatopoeia.

7. Refrain.

METRE in the sense of determining the length of verses by measure, regardless of grammatical punctuation-as we have attempted to show, first marked sentences. That is to say, the earliest verses were merely sentences; and the end of a verse meant a period, with its appropriate pause. As the period mark was not in use at that time, the turning was adopted to indicate where the period fell; and a pause there was as clearly understood as it is where we now put the period mark.

He that first ran a sentence over into the next verse was an innovator. He obeyed a necessity in demanding more space for his broader thought; but he fell short of a true and a great artist by not then discovering that the verse was a matter of punctuation. It was and is exactly as much so as the comma, the colon, the period and the paragraph. The innovator should have merely added to his tetrameter or his hexameter, whichever it was that he inherited, one foot,