another in English poetry before them. Their technical invention was mostly rediscovery, though none the less creditable to them for that. Their rediscovery was of something so forgotten that they might claim that it was new, but, however that may be, there has been nothing new since them in the strictly formal contour of English verse. What has been new, and what must always be new when a true poet is at work, is the rhythmic beat within that contour, and the genius of our language is happily such as to give this beat boundless freedom. Among our contemporaries no one has achieved a technique more distinctively his own, perhaps, than Mr. Walter de la Mare, but upon examination it will be found that this distinctiveness is entirely one of his rhythmic beat, and that there is no invention of metrical form. “Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller, Knocking on the moonlit door; is peculiarly marked by Mr. de la Mare’s rhythmic genius; but alter the beat a little and you get-- And they changed their lives and departed, and came back as the leaves of the trees. And again, to go back beyond Morris, we come even to-- What are the wild waves saying, Sister, the whole day long. Leaving out the question of the stanzaic form and line lengths, and the way these are set out on the printed page, there is in these three examples an almost exact stress-equivalence, but each has its own entirely individual rhythmic life; rather commonplace and obvious in the last of the three, deep-lunged and heroic in Morris, and very delicate and subtle in Mr. de la Mare. It is true that now and again a poet even to-day may contrive charming variations upon stanzaic form, as Tennyson did in his _Recollections of the Arabian Nights_, or as Mr. Thomas Hardy has done more recently in many of his lyrics. Every now and again also a poet may invent some attractive little device of his own in the smaller things of technique, as, for example, Mr. Frank Kendon, a new poet who makes an interesting experiment with rhyme-sounds thus--musing, mind, attuned, despising. But there is no particular virtue in these gestures once their novelty has passed, and the fact remains that from the coming of Wordsworth until all our best contemporary poets, by far the greater part of the most original work, and important work, has been done in recognised verse forms, and it has relied for its personal accent upon an individual rhythmic beat within those forms. The domination of the rhymed heroic couplet in the age preceding Wordsworth was so complete as to make the return to other more definitely lyric measures almost a feat of invention, but, even so, it is doubtful whether there is any verse form used by Wordsworth or Blake or Shelley or Keats, or any of their contemporaries, which could not in its essential character be matched somewhere in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.