On the subject of poetry, Emerson says:  “Metre begins with pulse-beat, and the length of lines in songs and poems is determined by the inhalation and exhalation of the lungs,” and this really goes near to the root of the matter; albeit we might derive therefrom the unsupported inference that a poet “fat and scant of breath” would write in lines of a foot each, while the more able-bodied bard, with the capacious lungs of a pearl-diver, would deliver himself all across his page, with “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.”

While the heart, working with alternate contraction and dilatation, sends the blood intermittently through the brain, and the outer world apprises us of its existence only by successive impulses, it must result that our sense of things will be rhythmic.  The brain being alternately stimulated and relaxed we must think—­as we feel—­in waves, apprehending nothing continuously, and incapable of a consciousness that is not divisible into units of perception of which we make mental record and physical sign.  That is why we dance.  That is why we can, may, must, will, and shall dance, and the gates of Philistia shall not prevail against us.

La valse legere, la valse legere,
The free, the bright, the debonair,
That stirs the strong, and fires the fair
With joy like wine of vintage rare—­
That lends the swiftly circling pair
A short surcease of killing care,
With music in the dreaming air,
With elegance and grace to spare. 
Vive! vive la valse, la valse legere!

—­George Jessop.

III

THERE ARE CORNS IN EGYPT

Our civilization—­wise child!—­knows its father in the superior civilization whose colossal vestiges are found along the Nile.  To those, then, who see in the dance a civilizing art, it can not be wholly unprofitable to glance at this polite accomplishment as it existed among the ancient Egyptians, and was by them transmitted—­with various modifications, but preserving its essentials of identity—­to other nations and other times.  And here we have first to note that, as in all the nations of antiquity, the dance in Egypt was principally a religious ceremony; the pious old boys that builded the pyramids executed their jigs as an act of worship.  Diodorus Siculus informs us that Osiris, in his proselyting travels among the peoples surrounding Egypt—­for Osiris was what we would call a circuit preacher—­was accompanied by dancers male and dancers female.  From the sculptures on some of the oldest tombs of Thebes it is seen that the dances there depicted did not greatly differ from those in present favor in the same region; although it seems a fair inference from the higher culture and refinement of the elder period that they were distinguished by graces correspondingly superior.  That dances having the character of religious rites were not always free from an element that we would term indelicacy, but which their performers and witnesses probably considered the commendable exuberance of zeal and devotion, is manifest from the following passage of Herodotus, in which reference is made to the festival of Bubastis: