is excellent at
mathematics, because she knows eight or nine different languages, because
she has acquired all the conventions of high-pressure training. Men do not
care about that. They want love and trust and kindliness and ability to
make a home beautiful and happy. Well, the poem we have been reading is
very pathetic because it describes a woman who can not fulfil her natural
destiny, can not be loved--this through no fault of her own, but quite the
reverse. To be too much advanced beyond one's time and environment is even
a worse misfortune than to be too much behind.

CHAPTER IV

NOTE UPON THE SHORTEST FORMS OF ENGLISH POETRY

Perhaps there is an idea among Japanese students that one general
difference between Japanese and Western poetry is that the former
cultivates short forms and the latter longer ones, gut this is only in
part true. It is true that short forms of poetry have been cultivated in
the Far East more than in modern Europe; but in all European literature
short forms of poetry are to be found--indeed quite as short as anything
in Japanese. Like the Japanese, the old Greeks, who carried poetry to the
highest perfection that it has ever attained, delighted in short forms;
and the Greek Anthology is full of compositions containing only two or
three lines. You will find beautiful translations of these in Symonds's
"Studies of Greek Poets," in the second volume. Following Greek taste, the
Roman poets afterwards cultivated short forms of verse, but they chiefly
used such verse for satirical purposes, unfortunately; I say,
unfortunately, because the first great English poets who imitated the
ancients were chiefly influenced by the Latin writers, and they also used
the short forms for epigrammatic satire rarely for a purely esthetic
object. Ben Jonson both wrote and translated a great number of very short
stanzas--two lines and four lines; but Jonson was a satirist in these
forms. Herrick, as you know, delighted in very short poems; but he was
greatly influenced by Jonson, and many of his couplets and of his
quatrains are worthless satires or worthless jests. However, you will find
some short verses in Herrick that almost make you think of a certain class
of Japanese poems. After the Elizabethan Age, also, the miniature poems
were still used in the fashion set by the Roman writers,--then the
eighteenth century deluged us with ill-natured witty epigrams of the like
brief form. It was not until compa