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Theirs was the mighty God who rul'd by love
The land, the sea, the starry worlds above,
Theirs were the days when merry minstrels stroll'd
O'er all the earth, and fairy music troll'd
Across green fields where dainty sylvan maids
With beardless shepherd lads, 'neath oaken shakes,
Were wont to dance the merry time away,
Whilst piping Pan breath'd forth some wondrous lay.
Theirs was Earth's mystic, shadowy childhood time,
Ere Culture came from Hell's sulphuric clime,
To teach degen'rate Man Corruption's smirk,
And turn him to a foul, dishonour'd shirk,
Whose craven soul must bow to putrid wealth,
And for his vaunted virtues crush, by stealth,
The only friend his fancies ever know:
The God who taught. Perdition to eschew.
Note: The Conservative wishes to call particular attention to the foregoing remarkable lines, which constitute the debut of our gifted Western Manuscript Manager as a poet. Mr. Ira Cole, though of profoundly poetical temperament, and inspired by the natural grandeur of his native West, never attempted verse until a very recent date, his "Dream of the Golden Age" being only his second metrical effort. When we consider the extreme rapidity with which he has acquired ease in heroic verse, we find reason to expect great things from his pen in the near future. His "Lines to Lord Byron" will appear in The Forget-me-not.
Metrical Regularity.
By H.P. Lovecraft.
"Deteriores omnus sumus licentia." Terence.
Of the various forms of decadence manifest in the poetical art of the present age, none strikes more harshly on our sensibilities than the alarming decline in that harmonious regularity of metre which adorned the poetry of our immediate ancestors.
That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. As old a critic as Dionysius of Halicarnassus and as modem a philosopher as Hegel have each affirmed that versification in poetry is not alone a necessary attribute, but the very foundation as well; Hegel, indeed, placing metre above metaphorical imagination as the essence of all poetic creation.
Science can likewise trace the metrical instinct from the very infancy of mankind, or even beyond, to the pre-human age of the apes. Nature is in itself an unending succession of regular impulses. The steady recurrence of the seasons and of the moonlight, the coming and going of the day, the ebb and flow of the tides, the beating of the heart and pulses, the tread of the feet in walking, and countless other phenomena of like regularity, have all combined to inculcate in the human brain a rhythmic sense which is as manifest in the most
