Nothing that is good should ever be despised or cast aside; but because of its excellences, we should not be blind to the possibility of other excellences.

Now Japanese literature has other forms of poetry--forms in which it is possible to produce poems of immense length, but the spirit of epigrammatic poetry has really been controlling even these to a great degree.
I mean that so far as I am able to understand the subject, the tendency of all Japanese poetry is to terse expression.

Were it not well therefore to consider at least the possible result of a totally opposite tendency,--expansion of fancy, luxuriance of expression?
Terseness of expression, pithiness, condensation, are of vast importance in prose, but poetry has other methods, and the "Kalevala" is one of the best possible object lessons in the study of such methods, because of the very simplicity and naturalness with which they are followed.
Of course there was parallelism in Western poetry, and all arts of repetition, before anybody knew anything about the "Kalevala." The most poetical part of Bible English, as I said, whether in the Bible itself or in the Book of Common Prayer, depends almost entirely for its literary effect upon parallelism, because the old Hebrews, like the old Finns, practised this art of expression.

Loosely and vaguely it was practised also by many poets almost unconsciously, who had been particularly influenced by the splendour of the scriptural translation.

It had figured in prose-poetry as early as the time of Sir Thomas Browne.