Hardly a breath;

The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these

Thou too shalt rest.

Walter Savage Landor has more great short poems to his credit than any other English poet. The best known of these, after "Rose Aylmer," is "On his Seventy-fifth Birthday":

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Hardly inferior to this is his quatrain, "On Death”:

Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear:

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear.

In a lighter vein is Landor's "With Petrarch's Sonnets":

Behold what homage to his idol paid

The tuneful suppliant of Valclusa's shade.

His verses still the tender heart engage,

They charm'd a rude, and please a polish'd age:

Some are to nature and to passion true,

And all had been so, had he lived for you.

Using the same metrical form, Matthew Prior pays a lady a similar compliment in his lines "Written in a Lady's Milton":

With virtue such as yours had Eve been arm'd,
In vain the fruit had blush'd, the serpent charm'd.
Nor had our bliss by penitence been bought,
Nor had frail Adam fall'n, nor Milton wrote.

"Her Initials," by Thomas Hardy, tells a different story.

Upon a poet's page I wrote

Of old two letters of her name;

Part seemed she of the effulgent thought
Whence that high singer's rapture came.
-When now I turn the leaf the same
Immortal light illumes the lay,

But from the letters of her name
The radiance has waned away!

The eighteenth century was fond of such witty, cynical epigrams as the following couplet which Pope caused to be engraved on the collar of a dog which he presented to the Prince of Wales:

I am His Highness' dog at Kew;

Pray, tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

Much more modern in sentiment is William Watson's epitaph for a dog:

His friends he loved. His direst earthly foes-
Cats-I believe he did but feign to hate.

My hand will miss the insinuated nose,

Mine eyes the tail that wagg'd contempt at fate.

Let us return for a moment to the eighteenth century, which has given us so many epigrams. Mrs. Jane Brereton wrote the clever quatrain, "On Beau Nash's Picture, which

once Stood between the Busts of Newton and Pope." Beau Nash was a famous dandy and social leader at Bath.

This picture placed these busts between,

Gives satire its full strength;
Wisdom and wit are seldom seen,

But folly at full length.

The above lines suggested the following quatrain by the Earl of Chesterfield:

Immortal Newton never spoke

More truth than here you'll find;

Nor Pope himself e'er penn'd a joke
Severer on mankind.

One of the best of American quatrains is "Woman's Will" by John Godfrey Saxe:

Men, dying, make their wills; but wives
Escape a work so sad;

Why should they make what all their lives

The gentle dames have had?

A contemporary American poet, Willard Wattles, has written a clever quatrain entitled "Creeds”: *

How pitiful are little folk

They seem so very small;

They look at stars, and think they are

Denominational.

Leigh Hunt, the friend of Keats, is best remembered for his "Rondeau,” which is technically not a rondeau at all. The Jenny of the poem was Mrs. Thomas Carlyle.

*By permission from Lanterns in Gethsemane by Willard Wattles, copyright by E. P. Dutton and Company.

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,

Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add

Jenny kissed me.

"To a Post-Office Inkwell," by Christopher Morley, who edits for the New York Evening Post a "colyum" called "The Bowling Green," is one of the best of latter-day short poems:

How many humble hearts have dipped
In you, and scrawled their manuscript!
How shared their secrets, told their cares,
Their curious and quaint affairs!

Your pool of ink, your scratchy pen,
Have moved the lives of unborn men,

And watched young people, breathing hard,
Put Heaven on a postal card.

Autograph poems are numerous but usually poor in quality. Not quite sincere, perhaps, but certainly impressive are Byron's "Lines Written in an Album at Malta":

As o'er the cold sepulchral stone
Some name arrests the passer-by;
Thus, when thou view'st this page alone,
May mine attract thy pensive eye!

And when by thee that name is read,
Perchance in some succeeding year,

Reflect on me as on the dead,

And think my heart is buried here.

Although Lowell's "For an Autograph" is too much of a sermon, it is otherwise excellent:

Though old the thought and oft exprest,
"Tis his at last who says it best,-

I'll try my fortune with the rest.

Life is a leaf of paper white
Whereon each one of us may write
His word or two, and then comes night.

"Lo, time and space enough," we cry,
"To write an epic!" so we try
Our nibs upon the edge, and die.

Muse not which way the pen to hold,
Luck hates the slow and loves the bold,
Soon come the darkness and the cold.

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,-
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Ah, with what lofty hope we came!
But we forget it, dream of fame,

And scrawl, as I do here, a name.

For the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Boston Lowell wrote the following quatrain:

To those who died for her on land and sea,
That she might have a country great and free,
Boston builds this: build ye her monument
In lives like theirs, at duty's summons spent.