I am the teacher of athletes;
He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own
  proves the width of my own;
He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the
  teacher.

His speculations may lead to much in time; though for the present they yield us small instruction in the path we seek.

It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts.  Verse is written in metre and strict rhythm; prose, without metre and with the freest possible rhythm.  That distinction seems simple enough, but it carries consequences very far from simple.  Let me give you an illustration taken almost at hazard from Milton, from the Second Book of “Paradise Regained":—­

     Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
     From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
     If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
     But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.

These few lines are verse, are obviously verse with the accent of poetry; while as obviously they are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest possible incident—­how Christ climbed a hill to learn what could be seen from the top.  Yet observe, line for line and almost word for word, how strangely they differ from prose.  Mark the inversions:  ’Up to a hill anon his steps he reared,’ ‘But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.’  Mark next the diction—­’his steps he reared.’  In prose we should not rear our steps up the Gog-magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, arrived at the top, should we ‘ken’ the prospect round; we might ‘con,’ but should more probably ‘survey’ it.  Even ‘anon’ is a tricky word in prose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you a few minutes ago.  Mark thirdly the varied repetition, ’if cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd—­but cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.’  Lastly compare the whole with such an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write in plain prose:—­

     Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the view from its
     summit might disclose some sign of human habitation—­a herd, a
     sheep-cote, a cottage perhaps.  But he could see nothing of the sort.

But you will ask, ’Why should verse and prose employ diction so different? Why should the one invert the order of words in a fashion not permitted to the other?’ and I shall endeavour to answer these questions together with a third which, I dare say, you have sometimes been minded to put when you have been told—­and truthfully told—­by your manuals and histories, that when a nation of men starts making literature it invariably starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on to prose as by an afterthought.  Why should men start upon the more difficult form and proceed to the easier?  It is not their usual way.  In learning to skate, for instance, they do not cut figures before practising loose and easy propulsion.