Sometimes, indeed, she goes without our interference, and disappears only because of our neglect. There are poems that many men cannot perceive to be poetry. There are others, once poetry, now no longer so. Let us apply our formula to these phenomena, and first to the varying popularity of poetry, since our solution of this question will help us in solving the other. We shall find that the nearer poetry approaches to kinetic speech, the more easily is it apprehended by the multitude. Kinetic speech secures its effects by the presentation of facts, situations and stories, which are stuff not so fine as to slip through the coarse meshes of the general understanding. This explains the immediate and wide popularity of such poets as Longfellow, Scott, and Macaulay. Because prose, as a rule, depends more nearly on its kinetic than on its potential utterance, it is, as a rule, the more widely read. When, as in the hands of some nineteenth century writers, it emphasizes the potential element of speech it correspondingly narrows its public. Whenever poetry of high potentiality is read by a large public it will be found that its potential speech is condoned for them or hidden from them by more than usually vigorous kinetic speech. For potential speech secures its effects by suggestion. There is a bloom on its wings that a callous retina does not perceive. It is like a butterfly that has visited flowers and scatters their scent in its flight. The scent and the fluttering of its bloom-laden wings are more important than the direction or speed of its flying. It is always easier for the public to say, how fast, or where it is going than to notice these delicate things. The kinetic speech of a poem is understood by all; the potential depends for its apprehension upon the taste and knowledge of the reader. Words must have for us the associations that they had for the poet. We must be able to see them with his eyes, hear them with his ears, and taste their scents with nostrils not dissimilar to his. In time these things change. Unpopular poetry becomes quite popular, and indeed, no longer poetry, as it loses, through usage or forgetfulness, its proximity to the condition of potential speech. Accents are shifted from one to another syllable, and we should be deaf to the melody if we were unable to replace them. New meanings gather round the words, and they come back from later travels disguised in strange perfumes. The kinetic speech may be disturbed, but the potential has disappeared in a jargon of new sounds, a quarrel of new memories, and a chaos of new odours. Sometimes indeed, it is as if it had never existed.