You will have noticed that often when you feel very intensely about anything, and whether the feeling be a happy or a sad one, you try to satisfy yourself by singing some tune or another; that your emotions, in other words, try to find some sort of rhythmic expression. This is a deep law of our natures which none of the philosophers has been able rightly to explain, but it is a law which we all recognise. And the poet, too, when he feels and realises anything with sufficient intensity, finds his expression naturally taking on a rhythmic form. With each new poem this rhythm is a fresh and personal thing, and yet we find that the language which he has to use has through many hundreds of years discovered certain forms or metres for itself as being best suited to its character. And you will notice as you read these books that one poet after another does in fact use the same metrical forms, not lazily and for want of the trouble to invent new ones, but because his instinct tells him that they are the right and natural ones for his language to fall into. But the strange and wonderful thing is that each poet, while he adds to his authority by using these traditional forms, is able to impress them with his own personal sense of rhythm in such a way that they never grow stale, and are indeed new things with each new poet who uses them.

And so poetry is beautifully like life itself in seeming not to change yet always being new. Each year you see the trees covering themselves with green, the flowers in bloom, the young animals in the fields, the sun shining on the corn, the frost making its icicles

lish poetry through six hundred years or so would take a large volume instead of a few pages, but it may be possible to give you a simple outline that you can easily carry about in your memory without confusing a very important thing, which is the appreciation of poetry, with a very unimportant thing, which is the learning of dry facts about it.

The first great poet, then, who wrote in the English language as we know it to-day, was Geoffrey Chaucer, who is sometimes called the father of English poetry. In his verses, which show a mastery of words that has never been excelled, he told stories that are among the best that have ever been told. When a little later on you begin to read them for yourselves, you will find them full of beauty and amusement, for Chaucer's humour was as great as his passion. Then for nearly two hundred years, although poetry never died, and was sometimes served by such admirable poets as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey, there was no very rich period, and Chaucer remained a great and solitary figure in the art. It was not until towards the end of the sixteenth century, or something over three hundred years ago, that a large group of poets began to work together towards making English poetry the thing of which we should be prouder than of anything else that England has given to the world. It was then that Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser and Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare walked about the streets of London, and wrote the poems and plays that have grown even more wonderful as the years

mind could conceive, others, notably Robert Herrick, were writing exquisite lyrics of the country side and the simple fortunes of men.

Alexander Pope and John Dryden, the poets who followed Milton, were the masters of a period in poetry when a curious weakness of the age expressed itself, naturally enough, in the work of the poets. In life what we call good manners are the superficial token of fine character, and when there is no fine character behind them, they become false and silly, not being really good manners at all, but imitation good manners. Now it would be quite unjust to say that there was no fine character in the age of Pope and Dryden, or that there is no nobility in the work of these poets and their fellows, but it is a fact that people at that time did often make the mistake of supposing that good manners were a sufficient occupation in themselves, instead of realising that they could never exist at all unless they were merely the incidental result of fine character. And so they often gave themselves up to trivialities of life, and in their worship of good manners were apt to get no farther than foolish and affected manners, and this confusion in some measure reflected itself in the poetry of the time. But while we find in the work of such poets as Pope, a mechanical correctness of form and a conventionality of thought that is sometimes tiresome, we must remember that we have only to make a little allowance for this to discover that they, too, are carrying on the great tradition of poetry with personal and enduring genius.