Only the briefest epilogue is necessary concerning Mr Kipling's poetry. We have concluded as to his prose stories that his best work is in the pure fancy of _The Jungle Book_, and that we descend thence through his English tales and his celebration of the work of the world to clever stories of India and _Soldiers Three_. Upon each of these levels we meet with verse in the same kind, concerning which it may at once be said that at all times, except where the rule is proved by the exception, Mr Kipling's verse is less urgently inspired than his prose. The true motive which drives a poet into verse is the perception of a quality in the thing he has to say which requires for its delivery the beat and lift of a rhythm which crosses and penetrates the rhythm of sense and logic. This is true even of the poetry which seems, at first, to contradict it. Pope's _Essay on Man_, for example, which at first seems no more than a neater prose than the prose of Addison, is really not prose at all. In addition to the cool sense of what appears to be no more than a pentametric arrangement of common-places there is a rhythm which admirably conveys, independently of what is being actually said, the gentle perambulating of the eighteenth-century philosopher in the garden which Candide retired to cultivate in the best of all possible worlds. In all poetry there must be a manifest reason why prose would not have served the author's purpose equally well. Can we say this of Mr Kipling's poetry? Is Mr Kipling's poetry the result of an urgent need for a metrical utterance?