The reality of poetry is its beauty, its power of inspiration, its truth. Its beauty lies in its choice of words, in its figures of speech, in its music and in its sentiment. Any definition that is not purely formal is hard to give. Professor Shairp defined the soul of poetry when he wrote: "Whenever the soul comes vividly in contact with any fact, truth, or existence, which it realizes and takes home to itself with more than common intensity, out of that meeting of the soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of emotion; and the expression of that _glow_, that _thrill_, is poetry." _The Structure of Poetry_ The form and structure of poetry should be studied, but not to so great an extent as to blind the eye or deaden the appreciation of its beauty and sentiment. Brown, who wrote the beautiful story _Rab and His Friends_, has said, "It is with poetry as with flowers and fruits. We would all rather have them and taste them than talk about them. It is a good thing to know about a lily, its scientific ins and outs, its botany, its archæology, even its anatomy and organic radicals; but it is a better thing to look at the flowers themselves and to consider how they grow." If one reads poetry aloud he soon becomes sensible of a certain rhythm or regular recurrence of accented syllables that gives a measured movement to the lines. It is a recognition of this rhythm that makes a child read in a "sing-song" tone, as natural a thing as it is to sing. If we hear constantly repeated at frequent and regular intervals any noise, there is a tendency to group these separate sounds and measure them off regularly. The clock ticks with always the same force and with the same space of time between the ticks, yet we hear _tick_-tack, _tick_-tack; we can prove the difference to be in our ear, for it requires but little effort to hear tick-_tack_ or _tack_-tick, _tack_-tick. The ticking has not varied in the least. The poet takes advantage of this rhythmical tendency of nature and by using accented syllables at regular intervals compels us to recognize the swing of his lines. When he reduces this to a system he has established the _meter_ of his production. The poetical accents sometimes fall on unaccented syllables and sometimes on monosyllabic words that are not emphatic, but usually the metrical accent of any given word corresponds to its logical accent. The accentuation of a syllable tends to lengthen the time used in the pronunciation of that syllable, and so we call it long, although the sound of its vowel may be short. Short syllables are those which are unaccented, even though the vowel has the long sound.