the middle and the same number of windows on each side, than in contemplating the structure of a tree.  Uneducated people are far more charmed by the appearance of a rock which has a resemblance to something else—­a human face or an animal—­than by a beautifully proportioned and irregular crag.  The uncultivated human being, again, loves geometrical forms in nature, such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake, better than it loves forms of lavish wildness.  We gather about our dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more strictly geometrical.  The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal.  My own belief is that the trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence of less obvious structure.

If we apply this to literature, it is my belief that the love of human beings for the stanza and the rhyme is probably an elementary thing, like the love of the crystal and the flower-shape, and that it is the love not so much of the beautiful as of the kind of effect that the observer could himself produce.  The child feels that, given the materials, he could and would make shapes like crystals and flowers; but to make things of more elaborate structure would be outside his power.

To confine ourselves, then, to one single literary effect, it appears to me that the poetry of the future will probably not develop very much further in the direction of metre and rhyme.  Indeed, it is possible to see, not to travel far for instances, in the work of such writers as Mr. Robert Bridges or Mr. Stephen Phillips, a tendency to write lines which shall conceal as far as possible their rhythmical beat.  It is indeed a very subtle pleasure to perceive the effect of lines which are unmetrical superficially but which yet confine themselves to a fixed structure below, by varying the stresses and compensating for them.  It is possible, though I do not think it very likely, that poetry may develop largely in this direction.  I do not think it likely, because such writing is intricate and difficult, and ends too often in being a mere tour de force; the pleasure arising from the discovery that, after all, the old simple structure is there, though strangely disguised, I think it more probable that the superficial structure will be frankly given up.  If we consider what rhyme is, and what detestable limitations it enforces on the writer for the sake of gratifying what is, after all, not a dignified pleasure, the only wonder is that such a tradition should have survived so long.