It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied charm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings, without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in the opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's "Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist. Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_ on that eminently important body. The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the time that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that "Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?