Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/91

Rh many who command public attention and what is called the professional market have previously demonstrated that their natural bent was that of didactic and analytic, rather than of emotional and creative, writers. Their success has been a triumph of culture, intellect, and will power. These instances, as I have said of an eminent '''Cp. "Victorian Poets": pp. 91, 442.''' poet and essayist now no more, almost falsify the adage that a poet is born, not made. Still, we bear in mind that precisely analogous conditions obtain in the cognate artistic professions,—in painting, music, architecture. The poets and novelists by cultivation, despite their apparent vogue in the most extended literary market the world has ever seen, and ambitious as their work may be, lack, in my opinion, the one thing needed to create a permanent force in the arts, and that is the predestined call by nature and certain particles of her "sacred fire."

We need not enter the poet's workshop and analyze the physics and philosophy controlling "The Science of Verse." the strings of his lyre. That a philosophical law underlies each cadence, every structural arrangement, should be known in this very spot, if anywhere, where not alone the metrics and phonetics, and what has been called the rationale, of verse, but therewithal the spirit of the poetry of the East, of our classical antiquity, of the Romance tongues, of the Norse, and of our own composite era, are in