Marvellous dream! Cupid has offered his arrows for Jesus to try; He has offered his bow for the game. But Jesus went weeping away, and left him there wondering why. That may be taken as Mr Monro's most representative poem. On our theory, therefore (of this work as a link with the older school), the piece might serve to indicate the point which contemporary poetry has reached, advancing in technique and in thought straight from the previous generation. Not that it is the most 'advanced' piece (in the specific sense of the word) which one could cite from modern poets. Many and strange have been the theories evolved on independent lines, just as numerous weird technical effects have been gained by breaking altogether with the tradition of native prosody. But Mr Monro's poetry continues the tradition; and whether it be in content or in form, it has pushed forward, in the normal manner of healthy growth, from the stage immediately preceding. The new technical features are clear enough, and all owe their origin to a determination to gain the greatest possible freedom within the laws of English versification. Rhyme is no longer a merely decorative figure, gorgeous but tyrannical. It is an instrument of potential range and power, to be used with restraint by an austere artist. In "Children of Love" it occurs just often enough to convey the gentle sadness of the emotional atmosphere. But very beautiful effects are gained without it, as, for instance, in another of these later poems, called "Great City"-- When I returned at sunset, The serving-maid was singing softly Under the dark stairs, and in the house Twilight had entered like a moonray. Time was so dead I could not understand The meaning of midday or of midnight, But like falling waters, falling, hissing, falling, Silence seemed an everlasting sound. The verse is not now commonly marked by an exact number of syllables or feet, nor the stanza divided into a regular number of verses, except where the subject requires precision of effect. An order of recurrence does exist, however, giving the definite form essential to poetry. But it is determined by factors which make for greater naturalness and flexibility than the hard-and-fast division into ten-or eight-foot lines and stanzas of a precise pattern. The ruling influences now are various--the thought which is to be expressed, and the phases through which it passes: the nature and strength of the emotion, the ebb and flow of the poetic impulse.