In the choice of the proper framework for his conception the author’s task is made measurably lighter if he can find a fit pattern ready to his hand. Whether he shall happen upon this when he needs it is a matter of chance, since it depends on what the engineers call “the state of the art.” There have been story-tellers and playwrights not a few who have gone astray and dissipated their energies, not through any fault of their own, but solely because no predecessor had devised a pattern suitable for their immediate purpose. They have wandered afield because the trail had not been blazed by earlier, and possibly less gifted, wayfarers and adventurers. Perhaps I can make clear what I mean by a concrete example not taken from the art of letters. In Professor John C. Van Dyke’s acute analysis of the traditions of American painting, he has told us that when La Farge designed the ‘Ascension’ for the church of that name in New York, The architectural place for it was simplified by placing on the chancel wall of the church a heavily gilded moulding, deep-niched, and with an arched top, which acted at once both as a frame and a limit to the picture. The space was practically that of a huge window with a square base and a half-top requiring for its filling two groups of figures one above the other. La Farge placed his standing figures of the apostles and the holy women in the lower space and their perpendicular lines paralleled the uprights of the frame; at the top he placed an oval of angels about the risen Christ, and again the rounded lines of the angel group repeated the curves of the gilded arch. Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment: There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency. In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La Farge was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and this pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction. The picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if the pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In thus utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance but a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency to diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the restrictions of the sonnet: