A proceeding work is described; and the Book is replete and alive with motion--with progress--with action--yes, of action--of an order unusual indeed to the Epos, but unexcelled in dignity--the Creative Action of Deity! SEWARD. What should hinder, then, but that this same Seventh Book should have been written in Prose? NORTH. Why this only--that without Verse it could not have been read! The Verse makes present. You listen with Adam and Eve, and you hear the Archangel. In Prose this illusion could not have been carried through such a subject-matter. The _conditio sine quâ non_ of the Book was the ineffable charm of the Description. But what would a series of botanical and zoological descriptions, for instance, have been, in Prose? The _vivida vis_ that is in Verse is the quickening spirit of the whole. BULLER. But who doubts it? NORTH. Lord Bacon said that Poetry--that is, Feigned History--might be worded in Prose. And it may be; but how inadequately is known to Us Three. BULLER. And to all the world. NORTH. No--nor, to the million who do know it, so well as to Us, nor the reason why. But hear me a moment longer. Wordsworth, in his famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, asserts that the language of Prose and the language of Verse differ but in this--that in verse there is metre--and metre he calls an adjunct. With all reverence, I say that metre is not an adjunct--but vitality and essence; and that verse, in virtue thereof, so transfigures language, that it ceases to be the language of prose as spoken, out of verse, by any of the children of men. SEWARD. Remove the metre, and the language will not be the language of prose? NORTH. Not--if you remove the metre only--and leave otherwise the order of the words--the collocation unchanged--and unchanged any one of the two hundred figures of speech, one and all of which are differently presented in the language of Verse from what they are in Prose. SEWARD. It must be so. NORTH. The fountain of Law to Composition in Prose is the Understanding. The fountain of Law to Composition in Verse is the Will. SEWARD. ? NORTH. A discourse in prose resembles a chain. The sentences are the successive links--all holding _to_ one another--and holding one another. _All is bound._ SEWARD. Well? NORTH. A discourse in verse resembles a billowy sea. The verses are the waves that rise and fall--to our apprehension--each by impulse, life, will of its own. _All is free._ SEWARD. Ay. Now your meaning emerges. NORTH. _E profundis clamavi._ In eloquent prose, the feeling fits itself into the process of the thinking. In true verse, the thinking fits itself into the process of the feeling. SEWARD. I perpend. NORTH.