Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/110

 ON THE SLOPES OF PARNASSUS

is commonly believed that the extinction of verse—of verse in the bulk, which is the way in which our great-grandfathers consumed it—is due to the vitality of the novel. People, we are told, read rhyme and metre with docility, only because they wanted to hear a story, only because there was no other way in which they could get plenty of sentiment and romance. As soon as the novel supplied them with all the sentiment they wanted, as soon as it told them the story in plain prose, they turned their backs upon poetry forever.

There is a transparent inadequacy in this solution of a problem which still confronts the patient reader of buried masterpieces. Novels were plenty when Mr. William Hayley's "Triumphs of Temper" went through twelve editions, and when Dr. Darwin's "Botanic Garden" was received with deferential