This fallacy--of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we _learned_ to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching--seems a curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For--to go no farther--the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn the science of language--the practical relation of noun and verb and connective--before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every word it uses,--with an amount of diligence and of study which is really stupendous when we think of it--what wild absurdity to forget these years passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of the science of verse can be learned--what wild absurdity to fancy that one is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a science. Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it, remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor. The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity. No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example, is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master of his art and not be mastered by his art. Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have her inspiration, she must be in a true _raptus_, but the _raptus_ must be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once sublime and practical, of every act.