in minds which have inherited the world's wisdom and knowledge, and their thoughts have a scope and extent to which those of unlettered peasants are strangers, and their views of the problems of life and humanity are as those of a man to a child; but the strength of their feeling in simple passion is much diluted and their powers of expression are correspondingly less, so far as vividness and simplicity are concerned. As an illustration of the weakness of purely artistic literature, whatever its beauty and skill, to touch the depths of feeling like the purely unsophisticated language of the natural poets, who simply endeavored to express their emotions without thought of form or artistic melody, may be compared the closing aspiration of the famous and beautiful serenade in Maud,-- She is coining, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, Had I lain for a century dead; Would start and tremble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red,-- with the simple utterance of the Javanese lover in one of the natural flowers of folk-song,-- I do not know when I shall die, I have seen at Badoer many that were dead, They were dressed in white shrouds, and Were buried in the earth; If I die at Badoer and am buried beyond the Village eastward against the hill, Where the grass is high, Then will Adinda pass by there, and the border Of her sarong will sweep softly along the grass,-- I shall hear it. There are times when the vitality of poetry seems to be lost as one feels the simple and direct power of some of these ancient songs which spring from the heart and not from the head, and all modern verse seems like the pale and artificial product of intellectuality, weakened feeling, and language refined until it has lost its strength, and one is almost tempted to believe that civilization is as fatal to poetry as it is to religious enthusiasm. Of course this is not the case. The human heart has not lost its strength of feeling nor its power of expression, and modern poetry is greater in its power and wider in its scope than folk-song. But it has lost some of the peculiar strength which comes from simplicity of feeling and overmastering power of passion; and its language, if it has many delicate shades of meaning, which that of a primitive people has not, has lost the clearness and vividness of expression of those whose words are few, but which are the creation of their hearts and not of their intellects.