There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms. The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs, masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of the thought. But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.