And in truth the artistic elaboration of this sensuous medium[14] unfolds to us--it is the very demand of the art itself--another realm, another field, which we only really enter after having left behind us the prose of ordinary life, whether viewed as action or as literary composition. The poet is thereby compelled to move in a literary atmosphere outside the boundary of everyday speech, and to shape his compositions with an exclusive regard to the rules and requirements of Art. It is therefore only a superficial theory which would banish all versification on the ground that it contradicts natural expression. It is true that Lessing, in his hostility to the false pathos of the French Alexandrine metre, attempted, more particularly in tragedy, to introduce a form of prose speech as most appropriate. Both Schiller and Goethe have, in the more stormy works of their youth, and under the natural impulse of compositions carrying a greater surfeit of content, adopted the same principle. But Lessing himself, in his Nathan, finally returns once more to the iambic. And in the same way with his Don Carlos Schiller deserted the old path. Goethe too was so little satisfied with the earlier prosaic treatment of his Iphigeneia and Tasso, that he transferred them to art's more proper domain, remoulding them both from the point of view of expression and prosody in that purer form, wherein these compositions continue and will continue to excite our admiration. No doubt the artificiality of the verse measure or the recurrent echoes of rhyme has the appearance of an unyielding[15] bond between spiritual ideas and the sensuous medium, more rigorous indeed than colour in painting. External objects and the human form are coloured in Nature, and the colourless is an arbitrary abstraction. The idea, on the contrary, in association with the sounds of human speech, which are employed in the wholly capricious symbols of their utterance, possess only a distant or no ideal thread of connection at all. This being so, the exacting demand of the prosodical rules will very readily appear as a fetter to the imagination, in virtue of which it is no longer possible for the poet to communicate his ideas in the precise form in which they float upon his phantasy. The inference is natural that although the stream of rhythm and the music of rhyme exercises upon us as an unquestionable fascination, it is nevertheless not unfrequently and too much so the demand of this very charm to our senses that the finest poetic feeling and idea should be sacrificed. But the objection for all that will not hold water. In other words it is not true that versification is simply an obstruction to spontaneous movement. A genuine artistic talent throughout moves in its sensuous material as in its native element, which so far from being oppressive or a hindrance acts as a stimulus and a support. And in fact we find that all really great poets move with freedom and confidence in the measure, rhythm or