hing awhile--get into
a class and work to become at the head of that class; then, even if you
do not attain the full measure of success you had hoped, you will
certainly have the proud consciousness of having striven, and can
contemplate with pity

Those green and salad days: Can I rehearse
What sweets I ate and what I put In verse?

_Douglas Dane._

BOSTON, Mass.

CONCERNING SONNETS.

A few months ago the pages of THE WRITER contained some interesting
suggestions as to the advisability of a uniform indentation for sonnets
when printed; the writer favoring a New York method, which would bring
out even the first, fifth, ninth, and twelfth lines, setting all the
other lines an equal space to the right of these. I give a quatrain for
example:--

"The early star, soft mirrored in the stream,
Dim vistas of the dewy forest-road,
Yea, even the solemn, high-walled glen, abode
Of mortal dust long quit of deed and dream."

The writer's chief argument for this style was, I believe, that it was
used by a good printing house, and also made a neat appearance on the
page; but the question at once occurred to me, What is indentation in
verse for? Is it not a guide to the eye, to enhance the proper
recurrence of the rhyme (and in the ode to show as well rhythm)? If we
are to have a mere arbitrary arrangement of the sonnet, why not the same
in a poem of regular or inverted quatrains, or of the Persian quatrain,
which is now always given in this form:--

"I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every flower the fragrant garden wears
Dropped in her lap from some once lovely head."

Or imagine an edition de luxe of Gray's "Elegy" with every stanza
printed in this style:--

"Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, their destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor."

I could not take much pleasure in a book of sonnets where each page was
thus stiffly arranged, but should greatly prefer the indenting of lines
according to rhyme, the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth to be in line,
and the second, third, sixth, and seventh to be set somewhat to the
right of these; should there come, however, a Shakespearian sonnet to be
provided for,--lines rhyming alternately,--or any of those monstrosities
of fourteen lines, which have no regularity of rhy