of the metronome.  With the natural presumption of all self-taught men, I thought I had made a discovery in this secret confided to me by Beaver Brook, till Professor Peirce told me it was always allowed for in the building of dams.  Nay, for my own part, I would venture to affirm that not only metre but even rhyme itself was not without suggestion in outward nature.  Look at the pine, how its branches, balancing each other, ray out from the tapering stem in stanza after stanza, how spray answers to spray in order, strophe, and antistrophe, till the perfect tree stands an embodied ode, Nature’s triumphant vindication of proportion, number, and harmony.  Who can doubt the innate charm of rhyme who has seen the blue river repeat the blue o’erhead; who has been ravished by the visible consonance of the tree growing at once toward an upward and downward heaven on the edge of the twilight cove; or who has watched how, as the kingfisher flitted from shore to shore, his visible echo flies under him, and completes the fleeting couplet in the visionary vault below?  At least there can be no doubt that metre, by its systematic and regular occurrence, gradually subjugates and tunes the senses of the hearer, as the wood of the violin arranges itself in sympathy with the vibration of the strings, and thus that predisposition to the proper emotion is accomplished which is essential to the purpose of the pest.  You must not only expect, but you must expect in the right way; you must be magnetized beforehand in every fibre by your own sensibility in order that you may feel what and how you ought.  The right reception of whatever is ideally represented demands as a preliminary condition an exalted, or, if not that, then an excited, frame of mind both in poet and hearer.  The imagination must be sensitized ere it will take the impression of those airy nothings whose image is traced and fixed by appliances as delicate as the golden pencils of the sun.  Then that becomes a visible reality which before was but a phantom of the brain.  Your own passion must penetrate and mingle with that of the artist that you may interpret him aright.  You must, I say, be prepossessed, for it is the mind which shapes and colors the reports of the senses.  Suppose you were expecting the bell to toll for the burial of some beloved person and the church-clock should begin to strike.  The first lingering blow of the hammer would beat upon your very heart, and thence the shock would run to all the senses at once; but after a few strokes you would be undeceived, and the sound would become commonplace again.  On the other hand, suppose that at a certain hour you knew that a criminal was to be executed; then the ordinary striking of the clock would have the sullen clang of a funeral bell.  So in Shakespeare’s instance of the lover, does he not suddenly find himself sensible of a beauty in the world about him before undreamed of, because his passion has somehow got into whatever he sees and hears?  Will not the