What I rather anticipate is the growth among our writers of a poetical prose, with a severe structure and sequence of thought underlying it, but with an entire irregularity of outline.  The pleasure to be derived from perfectly proportioned lucid prose is a far subtler and more refined pleasure than that derived from the rhythmical beat of verse.  Take, for instance, such works as The Ring and the Book and Aurora Leigh.  Is there anything whatever to be gained by the relentless drumming, under the surface of these imaginative narratives, of the stolid blank verse?  Would not such compositions have gained by being written in pure poetical prose?  The quality which at present directs writers to choosing verse-forms for poetical expression, apart from the traditions, is the need of condensation, and the sense of proportion which the verse-structure enforces and imparts.  But I should look forward to the writing of prose where the epithets should be as diligently weighed, the cadence as sedulously studied; where the mood and the subject would indicate inevitably the form of the sentence, the alternation of languid, mellifluous streams of scented and honied words with brisk, emphatic, fiery splashes of language.  Indeed, in reading even great poetry, is one not sometimes sadly aware, as in the case of Shelley or Swinburne, that the logical sequence of thought is loose and indeterminate, and that this is concealed from one by the reverberating beat of metre, which gives a false sense of structure to a mood that is really invertebrate?

What I am daily hoping to see is the rise of a man of genius, with a rich poetical vocabulary and a deep instinct for poetical material, who will throw aside resolutely all the canons of verse, and construct prose lyrics with a perfect mastery of cadence and melody.

The experiment was made by Walt Whitman, and in a few of his finest lyrics, such as Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking, one gets the perfection of structure and form.  But he spoilt his vehicle by a careless diffuseness, by a violent categorical tendency, and by other faults which may be called faults of breeding rather than faults of art—­a ghastly volubility, an indiscretion, a lust for description rather than suggestion; and thus he has numbered no followers, and only a few inconsiderable imitators.

I think, too, that Whitman was, in position, just a little ahead, as I have indicated, of the taste of his time; and he was not a good enough artist to enforce the beauty and the possibilities of his experiment upon the world.

There is, moreover, this further difficulty in the way of the literary experimentalist.  Whitman, in virtue of his strength, his vitality, his perception, his individuality, rather blocks the way; it is difficult to avoid imitating him, though it is easy to avoid his errors.  It is difficult in such poetry not to apostrophise one’s subject as Whitman did.