rhyme they have created; and it is only when they are translated that our artistic sense is frequently pained or shocked at the attempt to retrace their rhythm and melody. Moreover it is part of the liberality of the art that the very circumstances of the restraint, involving much change, concentration or expansion of the ideas expressed, should suggest to our poet new thoughts, incidents and creations, which, apart from such difficulties, had never crossed his mind. But in truth quite apart from this relative advantage this sensuous and determinate form of being--in the case of poetry the melodious chain of words--is once for all essential to art. It is absolutely necessary that the result should not remain in the formless and undefined stream that we have in the immediate contingency of ordinary conversation. It must appear in the vital design and elaboration of art. And although this form no doubt in the music of poetry may sound too as a purely external instrument, it has nevertheless to be treated as an end on its own account, and as such as an essentially harmonious self-defined whole. This attention, which is due to the medium of sense, contributes, as in Art universally, and in the interest of seriousness,[16] yet another point of view where we find this very austerity vanishes; both poet and listener feel it no more. They are lifted into a region of exhilarating charm and grace. In painting and sculpture the artist is given the form in its material and spatial limitations for the portrayal and colouring of human limbs, rocks, trees, clouds and flowers. In architecture also the requirements and objects of the buildings proposed dictate more or less the defined shape given to walls, towers and roofs. In the same-way music already possesses stable definition in the fundamental laws of harmony. In the art of poetry, however, the sound of language to our aural sense is, in the first instance, unbridled;[17] the poet has consequently to regulate such absence of rule within objective limits, and to outline a more stable conture, a more definite framework of sound for his conceptions, their structure and their objective beauty. Just as in musical declamation the rhythm and melody should accept and adapt itself to the nature of the content, versification is also a kind of music, which, at its own distance, is capable of essentially re-echoing the mysterious, but none the less definite, course and character of the ideas. Agreeably with this the verse-measure ought to reflect the general tone and, as it were, the spiritual perfume of an entire poem, and it is by no means a question of no consequence whether the external form is one of iambics, trochaics, stanzas, alcaics or any other metre.