In Wales one can still see the genuine folk-song coming into being; one can still watch, more or less, the processes incidental to its birth. In that country, poetry was never held to be a mere string of words that you could repeat as if you were reading an article from the newspaper; conversational methods of utterance are kept for conversation, or for the lower levels of prose, and there is a peculiar chant used for verse. The poem is born with a music of its own; and if it have no such music innate in it, and inseparable from its words, then for all its rhymes and scansion it is no poetry. So in speaking their poems the bards give full value to this music, using a kind of chant which is called "_hwyl_." The word means simply "sail"; the idea being that the inner music of the poem swells and extends and drives along the words, as the wind will fill and drive the sails of a ship. The method is perfectly natural; the least introduction of artificiality into it is absolutely damning: there you would get the desolating thump, thump, thump, of the motor boat instead of the free flow of the winds of heaven. As regards the musical scale, this _hwyl_ is mainly monotonous; there is another kind or direction of scale in it, depending on the varying vowel sounds, which, though you chant them upon one musical note, have a certain rise and fall in them proper to themselves. If one imagines the scale of _do_, _re_, _mi_, _fa_, and the rest as being in a vertical line; then this scale of _a_, _e_, _i_, _o_, _oo_, etc., would fall horizontally; we can think of no better way of making a likeness for it. The richness of the vowels will make the music, and therefore the poetry. One can see this by comparing two lines, both popularly supposed to be poetry. I am monarch of all I survey; there is no music in that, and if one should attempt to put the hwyl into it, he would be guilty of the sin of untruth, which is the greatest of the crimes against poetry, according to the ancient doctrine of the bards. I saw Osirian Egypt kneel adown And one would be guilty of the same sin, should one repeat that lifelessly, and without the hwyl that existed around the mind of Keats before the line took verbal form, and out of which magical and alchemic element it was precipitated.