habits are acquired.  In the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English.  And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse.  It is not in verse alone that poetry is written.  Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne in memory.

Take this from Emerson: 

“The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord!  Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love—­there’s Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”

“I took a walk the other day,” so Thoreau tells us, “on Spaulding’s farm.  I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood.  Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall.  I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown to me—­to whom the sun was servant.  I saw their path, their pleasuring ground through the woods in Spaulding’s cranberry meadow.  The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.  Their house was not obvious to vision, the trees grew through it.  They have sons and daughters.  They are quite well.  The farmer’s cart path which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of the pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies.  They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through their house.  Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives.  Their coat of arms is simply a lichen.  It is painted on the pines and the oaks.  They are of no politics.  There was no noise of labor.  I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning.  Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking.  They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed.  Yet I find it difficult to remember them.  They fade irrevocably even while I speak.  It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again aware of their cohabitance.  If it were not for such families as this I think I should move out of Concord.”