There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedate sentence, ‘Contentment breeds Happiness,’ converted to mere emotion.  Note (to use Coleridge’s word) the ‘excitement’ of it.  There are but two plain indicative sentences in the two stanzas—­(1) ’Honest labour wears a lovely face’ (used as a refrain), and (2) ’Then he that patiently want’s burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!’ (heightened emotionally by inversion and double repetition).  Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations:  both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza:  with cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an outburst of emotional nonsense—­’hey, nonny nonny—­hey, nonny nonny!’—­as a man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought.

Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let us prosify the lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which genius has been able to reduce it and still make noble verse.  You have all read Wordsworth’s famous Introduction to the “Lyrical Ballads,” and you know that Wordsworth’s was a genius working on a theory that the languages of verse and of prose are identical.  You know, too, I dare say, into what banalities that theory over and over again betrayed him:  banalities such as—­

  His widowed mother, for a second mate
  Espoused the teacher of the village school: 
  Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
  Needful instruction.

—­and the rest.  Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius working persistently on a narrow theory will now and again ‘bring it off’ (as they say).  So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, did undoubtedly ‘bring it off’ in the following sonnet:—­

  These times strike monied worldlings with dismay: 
     Ev’n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
     With words of apprehension and despair;
  While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
  Men unto whom sufficient for the day
     And minds not stinted or untill’d are given,
     Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven,
  Are cheerful as the rising sun in May. 
  What do we gather hence but firmer faith
     That every gift of noble origin
  Is breath’d upon by Hope’s perpetual breath;
     That Virtue and the faculties within
     Are vital; and that riches are akin
  To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?

Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions.  The sentences, though metrical, run straightforwardly, verb following subject, object verb, as in strict prose.  In short here you have verse reduced to the order and structure of prose as nearly as a man of genius, working on a set theory, could reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emotional key.  But first let me say that you will find very few like instances of success even in Wordsworth; and few indeed