“I have known more than one young lover of poetry who read nothing but Browning, and there are hundreds who have drowned all the poets of the past and present in the deep music of Tennyson.  But is it not possible, with the whole wealth of literature at our command, to attain views broad enough to enable us to do justice to genius of every class and character?  That certainly can be no true poetical creed that leads directly to the neglect of those masterpieces which, though wrought hundreds or thousands of years ago, still preserve the freshness of perennial youth....  The injury [of such neglect] falls only on such as slight them; and the penalty they pay is a contracted and a contracting insight, the shutting on them forever of many glorious vistas of mind, and the loss of thousands of images of grace and grandeur.

“Oh! rest assured that there are no stereotyped forms of poetry.  It is a vital power, and may assume any guise and take any shape, at one time towering like an Alp in the darkness and at another sunning itself in the bell of a tulip or the cup of a lily; and until one shall have learned to recognize it in all its various developments he has no right to echo back the benison of Wordsworth: 

  “’Blessings be on them and eternal praise,
    The poets, who on earth have made us heirs
    Of truth and pure delight in heavenly lays.’”

* * * * *

By no means, then, to attempt a new definition where so many more competent have failed, we may nevertheless gather some points of certainty from the opinions cited above.

Poetry concerns itself with the ideal and the emotional, in nature, life, and thought.  Its language must be choice, for aptness of expression and for melodious sound.  Its form will embody the recurrence of rhythmic measures, which, however elaborated and varied in later times, originated in the dim past, when singing and dancing moved hand in hand for the vivid utterance of feeling—­in mirthful joy and in woe, love and hate, worshipful devotion and mortal defiance, the fierceness of battle and the serenity of peace.  While through all and over all must breathe the informing spirit of Beauty—­whether of the delicate or the sublime, whether of sweetness or of power—­harmonizing both the interior essence and its outward expression.

In the ejaculations of delight, fear, or wonder of primitive man at the phenomena of nature—­in his imaginative efforts to explain the mystery of power behind light, darkness, the seasons, storm, calm—­lie the beginnings of poetry; and religion grows from the same seed—­the desire of the finite to lay hold on the Infinite.  Every man is a potential poet, just so far as he responds to these yearnings after some expression of the ideal and the ineffable.

Poetry, indeed, finds its inspiration in all things, from the humblest creation to the Creator himself,—­nothing too low or too high for its interest.  In turn, it has inspired humanity’s finest deeds; and so long as humanity’s aims and joys and woes persist, will mankind seek uplift and delight in its charm.