We are not here occupied with the old threadbare question, "What is a poet"? but we may reply to it so far as to insist that when we are speaking and thinking in English the term excludes all writers, however pathetic and fanciful, who do not employ the metrical form. In many modern languages the word poet, _dichter_, includes novelists and all other authors of prose fiction. I once learned this to my cost, for having published a short summary of the writings of the living "poets" of a certain continental country, one of the leading (if not the leading) novelist of that country, exclusively a writer in prose, indignantly upbraided me for the obviously personal slight I had shown him in leaving him entirely unmentioned. In English we possess and should carefully maintain the advantage which accrues from having a word so distinct in its meaning; and we may recollect that there is no trick in literary criticism more lax and silly than that of talking about "prose poetry" (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as "poets." The greatness we are discussing to-day is a quality wholly confined to those who have made it their chief duty to speak to us in verse. On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of poetical greatness will be found to be originality in the treatment of themes, perennial charm, exquisite finish in execution, and distinction of individual manner. The great poet, in other words, will be seen, through the perspectives of history, to have been fresher, stronger, more skilful, and more personal than his unsuccessful or less successful rival. When the latter begins to recede into obscurity it will be because prejudices that blinded criticism are being removed, and because the candidate for immortality is being found to be lacking in one or all of these peculiar qualities. And here, of course, comes in the disputed question of the existence of genius. I confess that that controversy seems to me to rest on a mere metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish is a plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert Burns is a plough-boy, and ends by being set up, like Berenice's hair, as a glory and a portent in the intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same to start with? Is it merely a question of taking pains, of a happy accident--of luck, in short? A fiddlestick's end for such a theory! Just as well might we say that a young vine that is to produce, in its season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a similar stick that will issue in a wretched draught of _vin bleu_. That which, from its very cotyledons, has distinguished the corton plant from its base brother, that is genius.