The hold of rhythm upon modern poetry, even under conditions of analytic and intellectual development which have unquestionably worked for the increased importance of prose, is a hold not to be relaxed, and for good reason. The reason is this. In rhythm, in sounds of the human voice, timed to movements of the human body, mankind first discovered that social consent which brought the great joys and the great pains of life into a common utterance.... The mere fact of utterance is social; however solitary his thought, a poet's utterance must voice this consent of man with man, and his emotion must fall into rhythm, the one and eternal expression of consent. This, then, is why rhythm will not be banished from poetry so long as poetry shall remain emotional utterance; for rhythm is not only sign and warrant of a social contract stronger, deeper, vaster, than any fancied by Rousseau, but it is the expression of a human sense more keen even than the fear of devils and the love of gods--the sense and sympathy of kind.[59] (Francis B. Gummere: _The Beginnings of Poetry_, chap. ii, "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry." Pp. 30, 31, 82-85, 114, 115.) FOOTNOTES: [56] Compare with this a passage in a letter of Goethe's to Schiller about _Faust_: "Some tragic scenes were done in prose; by reason of their naturalness and strength they are quite intolerable in relation to the other scenes. I am, therefore, now trying to put them into rime, for there the idea is seen as if under a veil, and the immediate effect of this tremendous material is softened." (Translation of Professor F. B. Gummere, in _The Beginnings of Poetry_, p. 73.) [57] In these chapters of the _Biographia Literaria_, Coleridge was replying to the theories of Wordsworth as set forth in his Preface. [58] Compare the amusingly vigorous remarks of Mr. Swinburne on the want of metre in Whitman's poems: "'Did you ask dulcet rhymes from me?' inquires Mr. Whitman. ... No, my dear good sir: ... not in the wildest visions of a distempered slumber could I have dreamed of doing anything of the kind. ... But metre, rhythm, cadence, not merely appreciable but definable and reducible to rule and measurement, though we do not expect from you, we demand from all who claim, we discern in the works of all who have achieved, any place among poets of any class whatsoever.... The question is whether you have any more right to call yourself a poet, or to be called a poet, ... than to call yourself or to be called, on the strength of your published writings, a mathematician, a logician, a painter, a political economist, a sculptor, a dynamiter, an old parliamentary hand, a civil engineer, a dealer in marine stores, an amphimacer, a triptych, a rhomboid, or a rectangular parallelogram." (_Studies in Prose and Poetry_, pp. 133, 134.)