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subject which is to engage us this morning, ladies and gentlemen, has been stated in your programme by a title, just read, which fits in naturally with your whole present Course, on Art in its General Principles and its Particular Phases. The title describes the actual contents of my essay rather more accurately than the one chosen for it when it was first written nine years ago. It was then called The Essential Principle of Poetic Art. There is still a use in turning your attention to this former title; it will afford us a rather more significant starting-point. To most of you, I dare say, it would seem more natural to speak of the essential principles of poetic art, so many coöperating conditions, of course, must go to the making of poetry. But I purposely leave the main word of the earlier title in the singular. To follow to the end the varied conditions of poetic power, in all their diverging multitude, time would wholly fail us. We must content