A SCHEME FOR REVIEW.

The three Departments of Mind determining the three Divisions of Discourse. Exposition.

PROSE.

Oral.

Written.

I. Conversation - Three Things it Accom

plishes.

II. Debates- Burden of Proof and Presumption. Refutation.

III. Orations-Subject, Framework, Treatment, Parts.

IV. Speeches -Style and Value. Campaign and After-Dinner Speeches and Harangues.

V. Lectures and Addresses.

VI. Arguments. Arrangement of Points.
VII. Sermons. Appeal to the Feelings.

I. Treatises.

II. Histories - Topics, Spirit, Style, Arrangement, Summaries.

III. Books of Travel.

IV. Fiction-Purpose, Place, Divisions. Al-
legories, Fables, and Parables.
V. Letters-Purpose. The Seven Parts-
Heading, Address, Salutation, Body
of the Letter, Complimentary Close,
Signature, and Superscription.
VI. Biographies. Autobiographies and Me-

moirs.

VII. Essays-Style of Thought and of Expres

sion.

LESSON 79.

POETRY.

Two of the three great divisions of discourse we have spoken of oral prose, which addresses itself to the will, and leads to action; and written prose, which is mainly intended to instruct the intellect. We come now to the second division of written, and to the last of the three divisions of all, discourse

Poetry. Poetry is that division of discourse which is rhythmical and metrical and is addressed to the feelings. Poetry differs from prose in three particulars — (1) in its mission, (2) in its style, and (3) in its form.

I. Its Mission. -The mission of poetry is to bring sustenance to that part of our nature which lies in between the intellect and the will-that part which enjoys and suffers, which is open to disturbing influences and responds to every touch of impression-the feelings. Poetry finds its material in the world without and in human life—in concrete things, not in abstract. The most artistic department of literature, poetry, is near of kin, in its effects, to music and to painting. The poet is an artist, sensitive to impressions which ordinary nerves do not feel. His eye detects a beauty and a meaning in things—a beauty and a meaning that escape ordinary vision. His effort is to put this meaning into a picture, in which words are his colors, bringing all parts of it-the incidents, the persons, the events, the language, the feeling into harmony, knowing that those blind to what he sees will see and appreciate what he does. Much of poetry is too ethereal in spirit to inhabit a body so gross as that of prose. Prose is masculine and matter-of-fact, the

"common drudge 'tween man and man." You can harness it to the light vehicles of conversation or to the lumbering trains of argument. Homely, serviceable, and made for wear, prose will drag your heavy drays of thought from premises to conclusion. But it lacks the grace of form and of movement demanded on the boulevard and in the park. Poetry is feminine. It takes to itself a delicacy of form, a warmth of coloring, and a richness of expression alien to prose. Poetry deals with things as October light with the objects upon which it falls, painting everything it touches in bewitching colors.

Nothing is so insignificant that it has not a poetic side to it, and may not furnish the poet a subject for his verse, and nothing is too high for the poet's reach. He catches glimpses and suggestions of outward and of inward beauty; and, in the play of imagination, he works them up now into studies, and now into finished pictures that cling to the walls of our memories, and stream their gracious influences down upon our feelings, a never failing source of consolation and delight.

Of all literature, poetry has in it the least of objective purpose, the most of spontaneity. No great moral purpose, no purpose of mere instruction, is supreme in the mind of the poet as he writes. Some phase of outward beauty, some deed disclosing inward grace, some glimpse of spiritual loveliness has been vouchsafed him, and he hastens to embody in verse the sweet vision that has dawned upon him. In just the ratio that the poet consciously aims to give instruction or turn any wheel of reform, does he abdicate his own function and seek to usurp that of the prosewriter. Not that poetry may not teach, may not even preach. It may and it does. That is great poetry, the greatest, which accomplishes both without neglecting its ministry to the feelings. But it does these things, when it

does them, incidentally. It cannot subordinate its own proper vocation to any other without proving false to its mission, false to the mission of all fine art.

But no thoughtful person sets a light value upon this incidental service which all art performs for our intellect and for our moral nature. We are not to disparage poetry as an enlightening and as a reforming agency because it works intentionally neither upon the intellect nor upon the will. It works effectively upon both, even if incidentally -all the more effectively, it would be easy to show, because incidentally. The intellect takes more than miller's toll of the thought poetry contains, it appropriates the whole. The feelings, to which poetry intentionally ministers, react upon our intellectual faculties, and rouse them from any lethargy into which they may have fallen. And the feelings lie close, on the other side, to the will, which acts as they furnish the occasion and the motive.

II. Its Style. —1. Words. — Poetry does not confine itself to the language of conversation or of common life. It selects words for their beauty of sound and association, for their picturesqueness, for their elevation rare words often, words that are even obsolete in prose.

2. Arrangement. — Poetry uses the transposed order in a degree forbidden in conversation, unpardonable even in impassioned oratory. It condenses clauses into single epithets. "Imperfect periods are frequent; elisions are perpetual; and many of the minor words, which would be deemed essential in prose, are dispensed with.”

3. Imagery.-Herbert Spencer says, "Metaphors, similes, hyperboles, and personifications are the poet's colors which he has liberty to employ almost without limit. We characterize as 'poetical' the prose which uses these appliances of language with any frequency; and condemn it as overflorid' or 'affected' long before they occur with the profusion allowed in verse."

Direction. Study this extract from Lowell's "Vision of Sir Launfal," and note how these three points are illustrated:

Within the hall are song and laughter,

The cheeks of Christmas glow red and jolly,
And sprouting is every corbel and rafter
With lightsome green of ivy and holly;
Through the deep gulf of the chimney wide
Wallows the Yule-log's roaring tide;
The broad flame-pennons droop and flap
And belly and tug as a flag in the wind;
Like a locust shrills the imprisoned sap,
Hunted to death in its galleries blind;
And swift little troops of silent sparks,
Now pausing, now scattering away as in fear,
Go threading the soot-forest's tangled darks
Like herds of startled deer.

III. Its Form.

In treating of the form of poetry, we shall group all we have to say under the three heads of rhythm, meter, and rhyme.

1. Rhythm.-Rhythm is that arrangement of words which allows and requires the alternate stress and remission of the voice in reading. For each sequence of stress and remission, of strong and weak impulse of the voice, two or three syllables are regularly required.

The rhythm-accent is the stroke, stress, or strong impulse of the voice which falls upon certain syllables. In English and in other modern poetry, the rhythm-accent must agree with the word-accent-must fall upon the syllable of the word which is accented in prose. For this reason ours is called an accentual rhythm. In Latin and Greek the rhythm-accent falls upon a long syllable, a syllable whose vowel is long by nature or by position, a syllable requiring a long time for its enunciation. Hence ancient rhythm is based upon quantity. It is thought that these two rhyth