UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
What is true of all poets is among them all most markedly true of Whitman, that his manner and his matter grow together; that where you catch a note of discord there you will find something wrong inly, the natural source of that outer wrongdoing; wherever you catch a note of good music you will surely find that it came whence only it could come, from some true root of music in the thought or thing spoken. There never was and will never be a poet who had verbal harmony and nothing else; if there was
rhyme, there is some rhymed verse that holds more music, carries more weight, flies higher and wider in equal scope of sense and sound, than all but the highest human speech has ever done; and would have done no more, as no verse has done more, had it been unrhymed; witness the song of the Earth from Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound." Do as well without rhyme if you can, or do as well with rhyme, it is of no moment whatever; a thing not noticeable or perceptible except by pedants and sciolists; in either case your triumph will be equal. In a precious and memorable excerpt given by Dr. Burroughs from some article in the North American Review, the writer, a German by his name, after much gabble against prosody, observes with triumph as a final instance of the progress of language that "the spiritualizing and enfranchising influence of Christianity transformed Greek into an accentuated language." The present poets of Greece, I presume, know better than to waste their genius on the same ridiculous elaborations of corresponsive metre which occupied the pagan and benighted intellects of Æschylus and Pindar. I have heard before now of many deliverances wrought by Christianity; but I had never yet perceived that among the most remarkable of these—"an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace"—was to be reckoned the transformation of the language spoken under Pericles into the language spoken under King Otho and King George.
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