And not a girl goes walking Along the Cotswold lanes But knows men's eyes in April Are quicker than their brains.

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

For while the subjects of poetry are few and recurrent, the moods of man are infinitely various and unstable. It is the same in all arts.

So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

To take an analogy: if we say that a democratic government is the best kind of government, we mean that it most completely fulfills the highest function of a government - the realisation of the will of the people.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.