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So much for the theories; but it must now be proved beyond question that rhythm is the vital and essential quality in the beginnings of poetic art. Where to draw the line between prose and verse, between the recurrence which is regular and which is called for our purposes rhythm, and the recurrence that is not regular, is hard indeed; but perhaps a satisfactory rule may be given in the words of Professor Budde, a distinguished student of that Hebrew poetry to which so many advocates of the prose poem have made appeal. “The fundamental law of form in all poetry,” he says,^[145] “by which in every race and at all times verse is distinguished from prose, is that while in prose the unchecked current of speech flows consistently as far as the thought carries it, the range of thought and the length of the sentence changing often and in many ways, verse, on the other hand, divides its store of thought into relatively short lines which appeal to the ear as distinct not only by this shortness, but also by relations determined by laws definite, indeed, but varying with different races and languages. Whenever the formal factors of poetry are enriched, these smallest units, the verses or lines, tend to join, by a new bond, in a higher unit of form.”^[146] This formal factor may be now alliteration, now rime; with the Hebrews, says Budde, it was the thought, which made a higher unit of the short and separated units of line or verse. Lowth’s parallelismus membrorum does not quite cover the rhythmical structure of Hebrew verse; no matter if a fixed metre has not yet been found, the rhythm is evident, and its law is essentially equal length of the verses within the group.^[147] For a test, one must fall back upon that original organ of poetry, the human voice. Slave to the eye, one often reads as prose what one could read, or what could be read to one, as poetry.^[148] In any case, there will be debatable ground, perhaps neutral ground; but it is safe to say from theory, from the practical trial, from arguments of the learned, that so far the effort to obliterate verse or rhythm as the real boundary line of poetic territory, has proved a failure, and is likely to prove a failure as often as it shall be tried. The case must be taken to the court of human history and human progress; brought hither, all the arguments for poems in prose lose their power. If, as Bücher says, one is unwilling nowadays to let rhythmic speech pass, merely in so far as it is rhythmic speech, for poetry, that is because ages of culture, with increasing æsthetic demands, have quite naturally added new conditions; but the beginning of poetry as an æsthetic fact was in the sense of rhythm. The poem now laboriously wrought at the desk goes back to the rhythm of work or play or dance in the life of primitive man, and the element of rhythm is the one tie that binds beginning and end; if poetry denies rhythm, it denies itself.