... some perfect platform or Prosodia of versifying were... ratifyed and
downe.-WEBBE: Discourse of Eng. Poetrie.

Poet, no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried unto
it.... Yet... must the highest flying wit have a Dedalus to guide him.-
SI PHILIP SIDNEY: Apol. for Poetrie.

...Gif Nature be nocht the cheif worker in this airt, Reulis wilbe bot a
band so Nature...: quhair as, gif Nature be cheif, and bent to it, reulis
will ne help and staff..... KING JAMES I.: Reulis and Cautilis, &c.
Posse therefore may be an Art in our vulgar, and that verie methodicall
and comendable.-PUTTENHAM (1): Arte of Eng. Poesie.

But the best conceptions cannot be, save where science and genius are.
Tran from DANTE: De Vul. Elog.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

PREFACE.

IF Puttenham in the sixteenth century could wish to make the art of poetry "vulgar for all Englishmen's use," such a desire in the nineteenth must needs become a religious aspiration. For under our new dispensation the preacher must soon be a poet, as were the preachers before him under the old. To reach an audience of a variety so prodigious as to range from the agnostic to the devotee, no forms of less subtlety than those of tone can be effective. A certain wholly unconscious step already made in this direction by society gives a confirmation of fact to this view which perhaps no argument can strengthen: I mean the now common use of music as a religious art. Music already occupies one end of the church: the same inward need will call poetry to the other. How the path of spiritual development which has arrived at the former phenomenon must presently reach the latter will appear more clearly in the course of the demonstration to follow, which gives an account of the true relations between music and verse. It may be, indeed, that there