But Mr. Lowell's volumes furnish some illustrations -not many-on one side, of what we mean. When, for example, Mr. Lowell says, in the "Legend," Mordred, for such was the young Templar's name, he speaks in the idiom of prose. It is prose when he notes a transition about to be made with the phrase, "Here let us pause." It is prose again when he says And, though the horror of it well may move An impulse of repugnance in the heart, An illustration of our meaning, on the other side, is supplied in the picturesque phrase, which we quoted a little way back, from Milton's prose-"the poet's garland and singing robes." This is not metrical, but it is expressed in the unmistakable idiom of poetry. It is, perhaps, a garnish, rather than a disfigurement of the general texture of the composition in which it occurs. On the other hand, citations have frequently been made from Dickens of long passages written in an unbroken series of iambics-perfectly metrical. Yet no line could by any possibility happen into a production of Dickens that would be other than prose. Milton's prose, however, is incessantly "pawing to get free" from prose limitations. In general, it may, we think, be said that practice in verse tends to improve one's prose style, and that practice in prose tends to deprave one's faculty of verse. To the former of these two generalizations there are exceptions to the latter, none, we believe. Coleridge made as close an approach to a statement of the difference between poetry and prose as, perhaps, language admits of our making. He said good prose was proper words in proper places-poetry the best words in the best places. All but the most triumphant prose passages allow the change of words here and there, and even the reconstruction of sentences, without any serious injury to the whole effect. Change a word, however, in any perfect line of poetry, and the spell of its power is broken. How often, if you have the talisman sense of poetry in you-how often have you hovered in memory over a verse that had lost its charm, for a wrong word in it somewhere, and felt a poet's pains almost over again till the right word came back into it, like a keystone to its arch, and made its strength and beauty perfect? Such being the difference between poetry and prose, what wonder that it is the poetry of the world that survives with its own uneffaced image and superscription immortally perfect, while almost all the prose goes surely back into the bullion of the general thought and knowledge of mankind? It is form that embalms a production of the mind. What do we care now for the question of Demosthenes's title to his civic wreath? But every age and every race of men have an unflagging interest in Demosthenes's manner of vindicating his title to it. We hold it to be of the very first importance, in view of the radical difference thus shown to exist between poetry and prose as instruments of expression, that the poet, who would rank among the greater gods of his Olympus, should nurse his genius in the uninterrupted use of its own proper and peculiar language. He must lisp in numbers, and then speak in numbers, if he would have the numbers come. If he addicts himself to prose writing, one of two things, or both, will assuredly happen. Either he will affect the sensitive idiom of poetic expression with some alloy of its delicate purity, or else he will suffer some loss from perfect lubricity in the metrical flow of his language. Most probably both of these consequences will follow. Herein, we think, lies a part, at least, of Mr. Lowell's mistake, or of his misfortune, as a candidate for the poet's highest apotheosis. He has written too little poetry, and he has written too much prose. For his own fame, and for our wealth in letters, he might better have thrown away half the verse he has printed, as the mere exercises of his genius trying and training its powers, and then have used the time and the strength that he has devoted to prose production in maturing the master poems which would fairly have represented his poetic capacity. We doubt if there is a single great name in English literature that positively or negatively will not confirm these positions. Milton, for example, is reckoned, and justly, one of the chief masters of our English prose. How could that great mind be otherwise than great in whatever mode of utterance it might choose to speak? But then it is the significant fact both that his verse is often prosaic, and that his prose often breaks its mighty and numerous march with little fits of a movement which may be very fine indeed, but which, nevertheless, is not prose. Thus that extraordinarily nervous and that magnificent declamation of his, which is like Burke's, as far as the utterance of an essential poet can be like the utterance of an essential prose writer, but which is really like nothing else in the world, constituting a variety of literature by itself-Milton's prose, we say, recalls, with its reckless and resourceful headway, his own description of the progress of the fiend,who, O'er bog, or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, Of course, no sensible person will think that we are undervaluing such composition. We are only describing it for the purpose of showing how even such a genius as Milton could not master perfectly two instruments of expression so different as poetry and prose. Dryden is another of the traditionary names of renown in English letters. He might, perhaps, occur to the reader as one who united the two faculties of verse and of prose. He did write a noble prose, under the dominant influence of those masters of form in every kind, the French-but then he was born to be a prose writer; and, in strictness, he never was anything else, although he produced quantities of vigorous verse, which, in his day, was readily accepted for poetry. Pope wrote elegant verse and elegant prose. The faculty of numbers was so natural to him that nothing could spoil it. His prose practice, never very considerable, probably had no material effect on his facility in versification. And facility in versification was well nigh the only attribute of the poet that Pope possessed. The same might be said of Addison, a less facile versifier, and a less trim prose writer, though more various and more voluminous in prose than Pope. Burke was a genius of a very high order, essentially a prose writer. He is, perhaps, the most extreme instance that could be named of a prose writer whose temperament and whose imagination continually buoy him as if above the level of prose expression, yet without once making you afraid that he is going to leave it. His tread is as if he spurned the ground. But he never uses wings to fly, and the truth is he has no wings that he could use. Macaulay is another example of the essential prose writer. His prose marches like a numerous host. His verse is the same host marching to music, and hurried into a double-quick. There is no exchanged influence of idiom between the two, simply because the idiom is always the same, that of prose expression-on the whole, the most curiously perfect prose expression, con sidered purely as expression, to be found in our language. Campbell was a true poet, and he wrote melodious and spirited prose. Probably Campbell's prose gained from his use of verse. But not without proportionate loss to his verse. flats a note here and there, and very often in some of his pieces. In the second place, his facility of poetical composition was so imperfect as to give occasion to one of Sidney Smith's most characteristic sallies. Campbeli's poet-pains often obliged him to take to his bed after a successful stanza. Sidney Smith applied the formula: Campbell and his couplet were "doing as well as could be expected under the circumstances." Tennyson is almost alone among the poets in never flatting a note. Now that we think of it, we should not like to undertake the job of finding a flatted note in Shelley; or in Keats, perhaps. And these men are examples of nearly exclusive addiction to poetry. Of course, we do not mean that they are necessarily greatest among poets. But their poetry, whatever the degree of its merit, is at least unmixed poetry. Nothing occurs in it that is spoken in the idiom of prose. Thus much may suffice for illustration of our meaning. We are examining, be it remembered, the poetical recreations of a man who, probably, might have been a great poet. In the first place, his poetry "The Vision of Sir Launfal" contains that happy form of words which has gone into the current commonplace of poetical quotation— And what is so rare as a day in June? Mr. Lowell's quality is not such as to have enriched the commonplace books with many passages of similar popularity. The description of the ice-roof, built by |