Now this rhythm can be made the same in every line of the poem. This was the aim of Alexander Pope, for instance. My objection to this method is that it is both artificial and unmusical. In the case of the eighteenth century men, it gave the effect of a perfectly balanced pattern, like a minuet or fugue. In the case of the modern imitator of Kipling or Masefield, it gives the effect of monotonous rag-time. In neither case does it offer full scope for emotional development. I maintain that poetry is capable of as many gradations in cadence as music is in time. We can have a rapid group of syllables--what is called a line--succeeded by a slow heavy one; like the swift, scurrying-up of the wave and the sullen dragging of itself away. Or we can gradually increase or decrease our _tempo_, creating _accelerando_ and _rallentando_ effects. Or we can follow a group of rapid lines with a group of slow ones, or a single slow, or _vice versa_. Finally, we can have a perfectly even and unaltered movement throughout if we desire to be monotonous. The good poem is that in which all these effects are properly used to convey the underlying emotions of its author, and that which welds all these emotions into a work of art by the use of dominant _motif_, subordinate themes proportionate treatment, repetition, variation,--what in music is called development, reversal of roles, and return In short, the good poem fixes a free emotion, or a free range of emotions, into an inevitable and artistic whole. The real secret of the greatest English poets lies not in their views on life,--which were, naturally, only those which every sane man is obliged to hold,--but in their profound knowledge of their craft, whereby they were enabled to put forth their views in perfect form. Each era of man has its unique and self-sufficing range of expression and experience, and therefore every poet must seek anew for himself, out of the language-medium at his disposal, rhythms which are adequate and forms which are expressive of his own unique personality. As regards the length of the lines themselves, that depends altogether upon the apparatus which Nature has given us, to enable us to breathe and to speak. Each line of a poem, however many or few its stresses, represents a single breath, and therefore a single perception. The relation between breath and perception is a commonplace of Oriental philosophy. As we breathe so do we know the universe, whether by sudden, powerful gusts of inspiration, or through the calmer--but rarer--gradual ascent into the hidden mysteries of knowledge, and slow falling away therefrom into darkness. So much for the question of metre. The second range of problems with which we are immediately concerned, when we examine the poetic craft, is that which is generally expressed under the name of rhyme.