In truth the prison into which we doom Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be), Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace here, as I have found. That utterance of Wordsworth’s may be recommended to the ardent advocates of Free Verse,—that is, of the verse which boasts itself to be patternless and to come into being in response solely to the whim of the moment. Sooner or later the Free Versifiers will discover the inexorable truth in Huxley’s saying that it is when a man can do as he pleases that his trouble begins. Since I have ventured these three quotations I am emboldened to make a fourth—from John Morley’s essay on Macaulay. After informing us about the rules which Comte imposed on himself in composition, Morley tells us that Comte justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and intelligence of submission to artificial restrictions. He felt, after he had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of continual and unforeseeable improvement even in thought, and he perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of rigorous forms. It is because of their rigorous forms that the ballade and the rondeau have established themselves by the side of the sonnet; and the lyrist who has learnt to love them finds in their fixity no curb on his power of self-expression. So in the kindred art of music, the sonata and the symphony are forms each with a law of its own; yet the composer has abundant liberty within the law. He has all the freedom that is good for him; and the prison to which he dooms himself no prison is. II There is however a difference between a fixed form, such as the sonata has and the sonnet, and the more flexible formula, such as the arrangement within a framework which La Farge borrowed from the painters of the Italian Renascence. A pattern of this latter sort is less rigid; in fact, it is easily varied as successive artists modify it to suit themselves.