Your chairman has admirably said, in one of his charming essays, that 'History may be abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal; but poetry must be full of human life'. This consideration, I think, may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poetic expression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever changes may be introduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur in religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification of composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossible for me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of complete and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time, but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action possible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the hopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such as was presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in 'The Princess', by Browning in the more brilliant parts of 'One Word More', by Swinburne in his fulminating 'Sapphics', may be as little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in 'MacFlecknoe' or the lapidary splendour of Gray in his 'Odes'. I should rather look, at least in the immediate future, to a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer or the soft redundancies of 'The Faëry Queen'. The remarkable experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect upon the whole body of French verse, lead me to expect a continuous movement in that direction.