contains poetry, as it certainly does in abundance, then surely those lives of Plutarch which were followed by Shakespeare must also possess it.

Nor can I understand why the parts of Shakespeare's plays which are in prose and are often superior to many portions in blank verse should also not be called poetry. Take the first scene of the fifth act of _Macbeth_, where Lady Macbeth is walking in her sleep. The entire section, though prose, is one of the most poetic pieces in the entire drama. If the passage had been written in blank verse it could not have been improved. The poetry is there in the scene itself and not in any possible metre. Other lines might be cited, like Hamlet's remarks to Guildenstern, who tried to pry out his secret and play upon him as upon a pipe; or his reflections on what a wonderful piece of work was man; or his comments over Yorick's skull. All these selections are in impassioned prose and are as much entitled to the rank of poetry as are most of the blank verse of the drama. Hamlet's advice to the players though art criticism, and prose, is so lit up with poetic glamor that it deserves the name poetry more than the metrical version of some of the moral commonplaces in the play.

One may ask various questions of the critic who clings to the old definition that metre or rhythm must accompany poetry. Why should Conrad's supreme poetic description of a storm at sea in his _Nigger of the Narcissus_ not be called a poem, when you designate by this word Virgil's famous description in dactylic hexameters in the first book of the _Aeneid_? Powerful and deservedly renowned as the Virgil passage is, I venture to say that it does not as a poem rank higher than some of Conrad's descriptions. One would wish to be informed where the story of ingratitude in Balzac's novel _Père Goriot_ is any the less poetical than that of Shakespeare's verse play _King Lear_. Why is the succession of ideas in Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_ called poetry and not, let us say, Emerson's essay on _Self-Reliance_? Why call the descriptions of battles by Homer poems, but not those of Stendhal or Tolstoy or Zola in _Le Chartreuse de Parme_ or _War and Peace_ or _Le Debâcle_? And how can you on any pretense refuse to include in the category of poetry De Quincey's famous prose poems _The Dream Fugue_ and _Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow_?

Since the critics would not admit that any unrhythmical prose is poetry, it is little wonder that Baudelaire founded as a distinct and conscious form the composition he called "poem in prose." We are told by his translator, Mr. Sturm, that he had dreamed in his days of ambition "of a 

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