By rule you can make skeletons, but you cannot clothe them with flesh, put blood in their veins, thoughts in their eyes, and passions in their hearts. This can be done only by following the impulses of the heart, the winged fancies of the brain--by wandering from paths and roads, keeping step with the rhythmic ebb and flow of the throbbing blood. In the olden time in Scotland, most of the so-called poetry was written by pedagogues and parsons--gentlemen who found out what little they knew of the living world by reading the dead languages--by studying epitaphs in the cemeteries of literature. They knew nothing of any life that they thought poetic. They kept as far from the common people as they could. They wrote countless verses, but no poems. They tried to put metaphysics, that is to say, Calvinism, in poetry. As a matter of fact, a Calvinist cannot be a poet. Calvinism takes all the poetry out of the world. If the existence of the Calvinistic, the Christian, hell could be demonstrated, another poem never could be written. . In those days they made poetry about geography, and the beauties of the Scotch Kirk, and even about law. The critics have always been looking for mistakes, not beauties--not for the perfection of expression and feeling. They would object to the lark and nightingale because they do not sing by note--to the clouds because they are not square. At one time it was thought that scenery, the grand in nature, made the poet. We now know that the poet makes the scenery. Holland has produced far more genius than the Alps. Where nature is prodigal--where the crags tower above the clouds--man is overcome, or overawed. In England and Scotland the hills are low, and there is nothing in the scenery calculated to rouse poetic blood, and yet these countries have produced the greatest literature of all time. The truth is that poets and heroes make the scenery. The place where man has died for man is grander than all the snow-crowned summits of the world. A poem is something like a mountain stream that flashes in light, then lost in shadow, leaps with a kind of wild joy into the abyss, emerges victorious, and winding runs amid meadows, lingers in quiet places, holding within its breast the hills and vales and clouds--then running by the cottage door, babbling of joy, and murmuring delight, then sweeping on to join its old mother, the sea. Thousands, millions of men live poems, but do not write them; but every great poem has been lived.