Richter, the prose poet who was responsible for the prose poetry of two disciples, De Quincey and Carlyle. Richter's _Christ and the Universe_ is highly regarded by him as prose poetry.

Masson's prediction that the time was coming when the best prose should more resemble verse than it had done in the past, and that the best verse should not disdain a certain resemblance to prose, is being fulfilled. Remember Masson wrote before the _Leaves of Grass_ appeared, and before the vogue of free verse. Yet his viewpoint was severely criticized by a scholar like John Earle, whose _English Prose_ contains an attack on prose poetry. Earle says that prose poetry is found chiefly in ages of literary decadence like the Latin Silver Age in writers from Tacitus to Boethius. On the contrary, it is found as well in the golden ages of literature, as, for example, in Sidney's _Arcadia_, which he himself quotes from, in Plato, in Pascal, in Dante's prose. It is strange that this view of Earle's should still largely prevail. Poetry and prose are still regarded by academic scholars like Earle, Saintsbury, Courthope, Bosanquet Watts-Dunton and Gummere as two distinct branches of literature. Earle is right only when he objects to the clichés of verse in prose, but to-day we object to all clichés. Poetic prose, however, should not be used on every occasion, but only when an ecstasy is to be expressed. And, above all, it should be avoided--and this is how prose poetry got into disrepute--in expressing sentimental emotions, commonplace ideas, and the merely popular. When we read in eloquent prose, the grand eulogies on the flag, on the purity and redeeming virtues of mother-love, on the dignity of toil, on the glory of dying for one's country, on the goodness of God, etc., themes which have been celebrated so often that they are nauseous to us because nothing new is said, then we see how ridiculous prose poetry may become. But as Pater says--impassioned prose has become the special and opportune art of the modern world, and it can exert all the varied charms of poetry down to the rhythm."The muse of prose-literature," says Masson, "has been hardly dealt with. We see not why, in prose, there should not be much of that license in the fantastic, that measured riot, the right of whimsy, that unbalanced dalliance with the extreme and the beautiful, which the world allows, by prescription, to verse. Why may not prose chase forest-nymphs and see little green-eyed elves, and delight in peonies and musk-roses, and invoke the stars, and roll mists about the hills, and watch the sea thundering through caverns and dashing against the promontories? Why, in prose, quail from the grand or ghastly in the one hand, or blush with shame at too much of 

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