the exquisite on the other? Is Prose made of iron? Must it never weep, never laugh, never linger to look at a butterfly, never ride at a gallop over the downs?"

Yet George Moore, a great poet in prose himself, tells us in his _Avowals_ that the greatness of English genius does not appear in its prose, but in its poetry, i. e., in verse. The greatness of English genius _is_ in its poetry, but in the poetry of its prose as well as in the poetry of its verse. It appears in the ordinary dialect of its novels and prose plays.

As a matter of fact, poetic prose has always been used. It is found in the earliest as well as the later literature of every nation. The Bible, Oriental Literature, the medieval romances, early Saxon prose are full of it. It made a reappearance with renewed force in the romantic movement that spread over England, Germany and France in the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. In an age like the romantic, when the right to live and express emotions was pleaded, poetic prose, seeking restraint from metre, was especially appropriate. George Brandes has studied this movement in his _Main Currents_. Many of the leading writers of the romantic period used impassioned prose. Saintsbury has found much poetry even in the prose of John Wilson, who is not much read, one who was to some extent an enemy of the romantic movement, and Saintsbury reprints in his _Specimens of English Prose Style_, Wilson's _The Fairy's Funeral_.

America has contributed greatly to the development of prose poetry. Hawthorne, Poe and Emerson were the first great masters in prose poetry we have had, and I doubt if as poets they have been surpassed by any of our metrical verse writers. One of the finest poems in American literature is undoubtedly Hawthorne's reflections of his lonely life in the Ivory Tower, when he revisited his old chamber in Salem where he spent so many years. The famous passage from his diary, quoted in all big biographies, is as great a poem, though in prose.

Emerson's essays are studied with prose poems. I shall mention only one, the address to the poet, at the conclusion of the essay on "The Poet."

The Hawthorne passage is as follows: 

"Salem, Oct. 4th. Union Street (Family Mansion).--. . . . Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . Here I have written many tales,--many that have been burned to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted 

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