But first we note that—­securus judicat orbis terrarum—­in the beginning Poetry and Music did their business together (with the Dance conjoined as third partner); and that, by practice, men have tended to trust Poetry, for an interpreter, more and more above Music, while Dancing has dropped out of the competition.  The ballad, the sonnet, have grown to stand on their merits as verse, though their names—­ballata, sonata—­imply that they started in dependence upon dance and orchestra.  This supersession of music by verse, whether as ally or competitor, is a historical fact, if a startling one, which Mr. Watts-Dunton, in his famous article on Poetry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has been at pains to examine.  He starts by admitting a little more than I should grant.  “There is one great point of superiority,” says he, “that musical art exhibits over metrical art.  This consists, not in the capacity for melody, but in the capacity for harmony in the musician’s sense....”  “Why, of course,” is my comment upon this:  “every art can easily claim excellence, if it take that excellence in its own sense.”  Mr. Watts-Dunton proceeds:  “The finest music of AEschylus, of Pindar, of Shakespeare, of Milton, is after all, only a succession of melodious notes, and in endeavouring to catch the harmonic intent of strophe, antistrophe and epode in the Greek chorus and in the true ode (that of Pindar), we can only succeed by pressing memory into our service.”  But I, for one, should not seek counterpoint in these any more than in the recurrent themes of a sonata.  I should seek it rather in the running line which he pronounces (mistakenly, as I think) to be “after all, only a succession of melodious notes.”  C sharp, B, A, A, A, E, A are a succession of melodious notes and spell the opening phrase of “The Death of Nelson”:  as the vowels E, O, U, U, O, O, E, E, U are a succession of melodious notes, and, if notes alone counted, would spell a phrase of Milton’s great Invocation to Light.  But when we consider the consonantal value, the interplay and the exquisite repetition of—­

  Seasons return; but not to me returns
  Day,...

or note the vowel-peals throughout the passage, now shut and anon opened by the scheme of consonants; now continuous, anon modulated by delicate pauses; always chiming obediently to the strain of thought; then I hold that if we have not actual counterpoint here, we have something remarkably like it,—­as we certainly have harmony—­

thoughts that move Harmonious numbers,

or I know not what harmony is.  In truth, if counterpoint be (as the dictionary defines it), “a blending of related but independent melodies,” then Poetry achieves it by mating a process of sound to a process of thought:  and Mr. Watts-Dunton disposes of his own first contention for music when he goes on to say (very rightly), “But if Poetry falls behind Music in rhythmic scope, it is capable of rendering