to set against innumerable passages wherein either his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and, succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over dead flats of commonplace.  Let me tell you next that the instances you will find in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible; and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared with a passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed.  Take this, for example, from Jeremy Taylor:—­

Since all the evil in the world consists in the disagreeing between the object and the appetite, as when a man hath what he desires not, or desires what he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his spirit to the present accident hath variety of instance for his virtue, but none to trouble him, because his desires enlarge not beyond his present fortune:  and a wise man is placed in a variety of chances, like the nave or centre of a wheel in the midst of all the circumvolutions and changes of posture, without violence or change, save that it turns gently in compliance with its changed parts, and is indifferent which part is up, and which is down; for there is some virtue or other to be exercised whatever happens—­either patience or thanksgiving, love or fear, moderation or humility, charity or contentedness.

Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:—­

The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.

Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose.  Like much of Jeremy Taylor’s writing it is prose tricked out with the trappings and odds-and-ends of verse.  It starts off, for example, with a brace of heroics—­’Since all the evil in the world consists’...’between the object and the appetite.’  You may say, further, that the simile of the wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too:  that Homer might have used it (’As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while the nave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest’—­something of that sort).  Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchanging Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with the metre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something we discover to be the emotional pitch.

But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quite unconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse—­in which, however, he was no adept—­with a sure instinct for beautiful prose.  Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton:  “The Compleat Angler” is packed with praise of it:  and in “The Compleat Angler” occurs this well-known passage:—­