Similarly let us take another of Mr Kipling's themes--his delight in the world's work. Think first of _The Bridge-Builders_ and of _William the Conqueror_ and then turn to _The Bell Buoy_ (_Five Nations_) or _The White Man's Burden_ (_Five Nations_). In each case--and we repeat the result every time the experiment is made--we find that the author's motive, which lives in his prose, tends in his verse to expire. In _The White Man's Burden_ it expires outright, so that reading it, it is difficult to realise that _William the Conqueror_ has had the power so deeply to move us. This is true even where Mr Kipling's subject, which in prose has not taken him to the top of his achievement, has in verse taken him as high as in verse he is able to go. Mr Kipling's best verse is contained in _Barrack Room Ballads_; but even these do not compare in merit with _Soldiers Three_. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are the best of Mr Kipling's poetry, because in these poems rhyme and beat are essential to their inspiration. They are the exception which prove the rule that normally Mr Kipling has no right to his metre. _Barrack Room Ballads_ are robust and vivid songs of the camp, choruses which require no music to enable them to serve the purpose of any gathering where the first idea is that there should be a cheerful noise. Complete success in this kind only required Mr Kipling to fill in the skeleton of a metre which brings the right words at the right moment to the tip of the galloping tongue, and this he has admirably done. Where in _Barrack Room Ballads_ Mr Kipling has attempted to do more than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In _Barrack Room Ballads_ it is more pronounced. We may take three stanzas of _Snarleyow_ as evidence that Mr Kipling's _Barrack Room Ballads_, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass of his verse, _really had to be metrical_; also as evidence that, in so far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field: "'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell A little right the battery an' between the sections fell; An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels, There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.