If the stanza from Keats and the verse from the Bible are both essentially poetic, what becomes of certain devices of arrangement which are in Keats and not in the Bible poem, such devices as rhymes and regularity of accent? These are but instruments of beauty; the words and their arrangement are the result of the inward passion and beauty of the thought, and we in reading are acted upon by that result, and feel again the passion and idea that produced it. In inferior poetry cause and effect are reversed or fail altogether. Thousands of poets have tried to make poetry by devices of rhyme and line division, by deliberately arranging vowels and consonants into pleasant sounds; almost any conventionally educated person can learn to do this, just as almost anybody with practice can learn to play a piece on the piano and carefully obey every sign on the music score. But no music results, only an empty regularity of sound. Because there are so many of these mechanical pianists, the sound of the piano seldom attracts and arrests us. Because so many verses, thousands in the monthly magazines, have merely the outward form of poetry, thousands of persons have come to believe that poetry is an artificial trick of words. The heart of poetry is emotion and a sense of beauty. The great emotions, patriotism, religion, love, acting upon the poet, turn his words into magic sequences. When the poetry is finished and arranged on the printed page, we find, true, that it has a form, that it has metrical excellences, that its varieties of sound are thus and so; the poets are masters of at least as many technicalities as the little versifiers. The test comes when we read the sequence of words cooled, as it were, into a set form, and touched by their appeal to our inward sense feel them start into warm life again. If we go far enough in our reading to study poetry, then we shall expect to learn about the technical methods and rhetorical elements of verse; we shall expect to learn about the lives of the poets and about their growth in their art. Just so the lover of music will wish to study the laws of sound, even the mechanical and physical properties of musical instruments, mastering from a scientific point of view the conditions and materials of the art. Such study helps us to appreciate great music and great poetry. But it is not necessary. The orchestra will act upon us without our knowing how it is arranged. The true poem will act on us if we know nothing more than our own language and our own feelings. Our pleasant task is to offer ourselves to the great poem with attention and a desire for pleasure.