In carrying out all this, it will be safest, as always, to follow the course of nature, and begin where God begins with us.  For as every one of us is truly a microcosm, a whole miniature world within ourselves, so is the history of each individual more or less the history of the whole human race, and there are few of us but pass through the same course of intellectual growth, through which the whole English nation has passed, with an exactness and perfection proportionate, of course, to the richness and vigour of each person’s character.  Now as in the nation, so in the individual, poetry springs up before prose.  Look at the history of English literature, how completely it is the history of our own childhood and adolescence, in its successive fashions.  First, fairy tales—­then ballads of adventure, love, and war—­then a new tinge of foreign thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—­then elegiac and reflective poetry—­then classic art begins to influence our ripening youth, as it did the youth of our nation in the sixteenth century, and delight in dramatic poetry follows as a natural consequence—­and last, but not least, as the fruit of all these changes, a vigorous and matured prose.  For indeed, as elocution is the highest melody, so is true prose the highest poetry.  Consider how in an air, the melody is limited to a few arbitrary notes, and recurs at arbitrary periods, while the more scientific the melody becomes, the more numerous and nearly allied are the notes employed, and the more complex and uncertain is their recurrence—­in short, the nearer does the melody of the air approach to the melody of elocution, in which the notes of the voice ought continually to be passing into each other, by imperceptible gradations, and their recurrence to depend entirely on the emotions conveyed in the subject words.  Just so, poetry employs a confined and arbitrary metre, and a periodic recurrence of sounds which disappear gradually in its higher forms of the ode and the drama, till the poetry at last passes into prose, a free and ever-shifting flow of every imaginable rhythm and metre, determined by no arbitrary rules, but only by the spiritual intent of the subject.  The same will hold good of whole prose compositions, when compared with whole poems.

Prose then is highest.  To write a perfect prose must be your ultimate object in attending these lectures; but we must walk before we can run, and walk with leading-strings before we can walk alone, and such leading-strings are verse and rhyme.  Some tradition of this is still kept up in the practice of making boys write Latin and Greek verses at school, which is of real service to the intellect, even when most carelessly employed, and which, when earnestly carried out, is one great cause of the public school and University man’s superiority in style to most self-educated authors.  And why should women’s writings be in any respect inferior to that of men, if they are only willing to follow out the same method of self-education?