quirks which represent, to those who can read, the words, but rather on the essential words themselves. In fact, literature existed before writing; and writing in itself is of no value from the purely literary sense, except in so far as it preserves and transmits from generation to generation the literary emotion. Style, whether in prose or poetry, is an attempt to develop this essentially musical quality of literature, to evoke the magic that exists in the sound-quality of words, as well as to combine these sound-qualities in definite statements or sentences. The difference between prose and poetry is, therefore, not a difference of means, but of psychological effect and reaction. The means employed, the formed language, is the same: but the resultant impression is quite different.

In prose, the emotions expressed are those that are capable of development in a straight line. In so far as prose is pure, it confines itself to the direct orderly progression of a thought or conception or situation from point to point of a flat surface. The sentences, as they develop this conception from its beginning to conclusion, move on, and do not return upon themselves. The grouping of these sentences into paragraphs gives the breadth of the thought. The paragraphs, sections, and chapters are each a square, in that they represent a division of the main thought into parallel units, or blocks of subsidiary ideas. The sensation of depth is finally obtained by arranging these blocks in a rising climacteric progression, or in parallel lines, or in a sort of zigzag figure.

The psychological reaction that arises from the intelligent appreciation of poetry is quite different. In poetry, we have a succession of curves. The direction of the thought is not in straight lines, but wavy and spiral. It rises and falls on gusts of strong emotion. Most often it creates strongly marked loops and circles. The structure of the stanza or strophe always tends to the spherical. Depth is obtained by making one sphere contain a number of concentric, or overlapping spheres.

Hence, when we speak of poetry we usually mean regular rhyme and metre, which have for so long been considered essential to all poetry, not as a device for heightening musical effect, as so many people suppose, but merely to make these loops and circles more accentuated, and to make the line of the poem turn upon itself more recognizably. But it must be recognized that just as Giotto's circle was none the less a circle, although not drawn with compasses, so poetic circles can be constructed out of subtler and more musical curves than that which painstakingly follows the selfsame 

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