Poetry? By heaven, yes! And on a contemporary problem? Look at the title of it: "On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament"; and the date given, too; 1646. But does he discuss? Does he consider? Indeed he does not. He flames forth from the standpoint of the soul; he is still God's Warrior, and you dare not mention truce to him. So those prosaic names, that "mere A. S. and Rutherford," "shallow Edwards," and above all the ridiculous "Scotch What-d'ye-call," become flaming and terrible poetic utterances on his lips; he blasts with them the fools that dare stand up against the liberty and supremacy of the soul. But suppose, instead of this terse, burning sonnet so entirely free from the atmosphere of argumentation, he had written a long story designed to thrash the matter out from the standpoint of pure reason? Some one might do so; and the work might be one of great value; but it would not be poetic; it could not be Miltonic; it would be a novel with a purpose, not an epic poem. There are problems and problems; those which poetry may specifically handle, are, I think, the same yesterday, today and forever. Who is to hinder her handling what problems she likes; will you set down rules for her? Heaven forbid! it were more profitable to build a fence about the cuckoo. But the fact remains that she will touch these, and will not touch those others. Charm you never so wisely, she will not come from her own ground. For all your birdlime of earnestness, of enthusiasm, of excellent purpose, it is some masquerading jackdaw you will have captured, not the Bird of Paradise; unless it is the trees of Paradise you have limed. Poetry hardly deals with any historic period, old or new; she leaves those to the historians, and has a period of her own, which is eternal. What then, you say, of those "New Forcers of Conscience in the Long Parliament?" This! that that parliament is so long that it has been sitting any time this two thousand years, and is sitting now, in all our towns and villages. "New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large"; A. S. and Rutherford, Shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d'ye-call--they all preach in a thousand pulpits every Sunday. For they are prototypal figures, and plot and persecute wherever there is bigotry or ecclesiastical dominance. Against them, and, so far as one has been able to discover, against them _only_, does poetry ever come forth armed, enangered, utterly ruthless. It is she that has pity and pardon for the Magdalene and the publican; but a whip of bitter small chords for those that have made her Father's house into a den of thieves. Do you doubt it? Then find some passage where anger is expressed, not in rhetoric, not in mere fustian bombast, but with the sublime music and undertone, the ring of genuine poetry; perhaps an anger without mercy, a declaration of utter war; and see whether it is not directed _always_ against this same ecclesiasticism.