are apparently reassured when through the imaginary world of art breaks some accent of ordinary speech, some aspect of our common sordidness. Here, it seems, we touch earth and are strengthened. The cult of the natural at its best asks of the medium of art also, as well as of the subject, that it wear a common aspect, untouched by artifice. Many of the new poets take as their ideal “the sequence of the spoken phrase”, with a special dislike of all “inversions”; the “language of common speech” will serve their purposes. Yet most of them are better poets than their theories would indicate, and their practise, like Wordsworth’s in a similar predicament, is perhaps sufficient guide to the kind of naturalness they are after. _An Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg_ is the kind of naturalness Wordsworth fell into when he was off his guard. “Other poets”, says a more modern cultivator of naturalism, “will come and perchance perfect where these men have given the tools. Other writers, forgetting the stormy times in which this movement had its birth, will inherit in plenitude and calm that for which they have fought.” Most of us who are convinced that all speech is artful in so far as it is intelligible, can occasionally put up with a bit of fine writing like this, but we note in passing that “perchance” and “plenitude” are not the language of common speech today. As for the fear of inversions and the sacredness of the natural word-order, it is enough for the moment to observe that no one order is natural for all peoples, nor for any one speech at all times; different word-orders express different states of emotion, even different ideas, and one is as natural as the other. “Tell me not in mournful numbers” or “Tell not me in mournful numbers”—which is the natural order? From another and contemporary New England poet, who sticks valiantly for the natural sequence of speech, we may examine a characteristic line, which has as high a percentage of nature in it as absence of art can insure—“I must pass that door to go to bed.” Would it be less natural to say, “To go to bed, I must pass that door”?