Now, a modern poet who wishes to create in real harmony with contemporary feeling must himself have something of the perpetual excitement, the unremitting watchfulness, the restless and nervous sensitiveness of our time; his heart must unconsciously beat in tact with the rhythm of the world around him. But not only unrest must flicker in him, not only must that excessive delicacy of feeling which is almost morbid be in him, this neurasthenic sleeplessness--not only the negative element of our epoch, but the grandiose as well, the superdimensional, the spontaneity of the sudden discharge of forces held in reserve, the overwhelming force of the great eruption. Like the masses of our towns, he must be so fashioned that a trifle will stimulate him to the greatest passion, must be so fashioned that he cannot help being carried away by the intoxication of his own strength. Just as the masses have, so to speak, organised themselves as a body, so that there is no individual excitement in them, no irritation and inflammation of any single part, but so that a reaction of the whole body responds to every separate irritation, just in the same manner must the excitement of a modern, a contemporary poet, a poet of a great town, never be the excitement of a single sense, but, if it is to be strong, it must quiver through the whole body like an electric shock. His poetic rhythm must therefore be physically vital; it must envelop all his feeling and thinking; it must respond to every individual irritation, to every individual sensation, with the massed weight of feeling of all his vital forces: the need of a rhythm strained to the full must be, as Nietzsche has so wonderfully demonstrated in his _Ecce Homo_! a measure for the strength of the inspiration, a sort of balancing, as it were, of the pressure and tension of the inspiration. For the poet of to-day, if he does not wish to remain the poet of the eternal yesterday, must, as a microcosm, imitate in his passion the macrocosm of the multitude, wherein also the excitement of the individual is trivial and aimless, and only the ebullition of the whole fermenting mass is irresistible and momentous.