To the eye the page of the new poet presented about the same contrast with the page of the popular poets that trees and the free, unbidden growths of nature do with a carefully clipped hedge; and to the spirit the contrast was about the same. The hedge is the more studiedly and obviously beautiful, but, ah! there is a kind of beauty and satisfaction in trees that one would not care to lose. There are symmetry and proportion in the sonnet, but to me there is something I would not exchange for them in the wild swing and balance of many free and unrhymed passages in Shakespeare; like the one, for instance, in which these lines occur:-- "To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round About the pendent world." Here is the spontaneous grace and symmetry of a forest tree, or a soughing mass of foliage. And this passage from my poet I do not think could be improved by the verse-maker's art:-- "This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my Spirit, _When we become the enfolders of those orbs and the pleasure and knowledge of everything in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then?_ And my Spirit said, No, _we but level that lift, to pass and continue beyond."_ Such breaking with the routine poetic, and with the grammar of verse, was of course a dangerous experiment, and threw the composer absolutely upon his intrinsic merits, upon his innately poetic and rhythmic quality. He must stand or fall by these alone, since he discarded all artificial, all adventitious helps. If interior, spontaneous rhythm could not be relied on, and the natural music and flexibility of language, then there was nothing to shield the ear from the pitiless hail of words,--not one softly padded verse anywhere. All poets, except those of the very first order, owe immensely to the form, the art, the stereotyped metres, and stock figures they find ready to hand. The form is suggestive,--it invites and aids expression, and lends itself readily, like fashion, to conceal, or extenuate, or eke out poverty of thought and feeling in the verse. The poet can "cut and cover," as the farmer says, in a way the prose-writer never can, nor one whose form is essentially prose, like Whitman's.