Moreover, not only is a rhythmic music the natural utterance of impassioned thought for him who speaks. It is the necessary instrument for inducing the proper, the receptive, mood in him who hears. We know how it is with music, when all the air is vibrating and chanting with some vast organ-swell. We know how we are stirred to our inmost depths simply by mere harmony and sequence of sounds. We do not know why it is so, why our mood should be attuned to sorrow, gaiety, enthusiasm, heroism, meditation, by the hearing of music in its various kinds. We do not know, either, why the mere shapes of the sublime architecture of some great abbey or cathedral, or the blended colours of its deep-damasked window-stains, should fill our hearts with devout or poignant aspirations. Yet we know that the fact is so. And it is the same with poetry. The rhythm and melody which come spontaneously from the poet's mood dispose the hearer in the self-same way; they fit him to receive what the other brings. Verse, as we now understand that term, poetry need not be. But though it may look like prose because the lines stretch all across the page and cannot be measured by so many iambics or anapæsts, yet, if it be real poetry, heart-felt and heart-moving, it will be but a delusive prose, a prose of infinitely subtle rhythms and harmonies. It will be as far removed as the Homeric hexameter from the pedestrian motion of cold argument.
Poetry will never fail us until nature fails. We may miss the transcendent voices now, but we have had during this century more than a century's usual share, and with the first widespread rise of some new moral fervour or lofty hope and aim the great poet cannot be wanting to give it shape in thrilling verse.
Poetry will never fail us. The poetry of nature will not fail us. So long as the sun shall each night and morning glorify the heavens with his inexhaustible splendours, or the majestic moon ride in her mysterious silence between the everchanging isles of cloud; so long as innumerable starry worlds shine down their unspeakable peace into human hearts; so long as the flower shall open out its loveliness, dance in the breeze, shed its perfumes, and then close its petals in sleep and drink in the refreshment of the unfailing dew; so long as the tree shall put forth its tender greenery of leaf in the spring, blossom into gold and fire in summer and in the autumn bow down with fruits; so long as water shall leap and foam and thunder in cataracts down the mountain-side, or ripple and smile over the pebble or under the fern—so long shall the heart of man respond to sun and moon and stars, to flower and tree and stream, and there shall be poetry.
And as man's vision, intensified by the lens of science, pierces deeper and deeper into the universe of the ineffably great and the illimitably small, and as his wonder and awe increase with what they feed upon, so will the finer souls of humankind be thrilled and thrilled again with rich new suggestions and exquisite emotions, and they shall express them in poetry.
The poetry of man will not fail us. So long as man has a heart wherewith to love another better than himself, to feel the joy of possession or the pang of loss, to glow with pride at a nation's glories or mourn in its dejection, so long shall the lyric and the elegy, in whatsoever shape, create themselves ever afresh.
Till all our life, its institutions, and its beliefs are perfect: till man has no doubts, no fears, no hopes: till he has analysed all his emotions and despises them: till the heavens above and the earth beneath can be read like a printed scroll: till nature has yielded up her last mystery: till that day poetry will exist among men.
And we may dare to assert that the future of poetry is destined to be greater than its past, that Tennyson's prayer will be fulfilled—
Let knowledge grow from more to more,
But more of reverence in us dwell,
That mind and soul, according well,
May make one music as before
But vaster,
And the expression of that music will be poetry.