IN true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it when they are made to scan:—Friends, Rom"ans, count"rymen, lend me"your ears!, has in spontaneous poetry only a submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume, poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, and the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples of today.