ratively modern times that our Western
world fully recognized the value of the distich, triplet or quatrain for
the expression of beautiful thoughts, rather than for the expression of
ill-natured ones. But now that the recognition has come, it has been
discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or
four lines. Only great masters have been truly successful at it. Goethe,
you know, made a quatrain that has become a part of world-literature:

Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,--
Who ne'er the lonely midnight hours,
Weeping upon his bed has sate,
He knows ye not, ye Heavenly Powers!

--meaning, of course, that inspiration and wisdom come to us only through
sorrow, and that those who have never suffered never can be wise. But in
the universities of England a great deal of short work of a most excellent
kind has been done in Greek and Latin; and there is the celebrated case of
an English student who won a prize by a poem of a single line. The subject
given had been the miracle of Christ's turning water into wine at the
marriage feast; and while other scholars attempted elaborate composition
on the theme, this student wrote but one verse, of which the English
translation is

The modest water saw its Lord, and blushed.

Of course the force of the idea depends upon the popular conception of
wine being red. The Latin and Greek model, however, did not seem to
encourage much esthetic effort in short poems of English verse until the
time of the romantic movement. Then, both in France and England, many
brief forms of poetry made their appearance. In France, Victor Hugo
attempted composition in astonishingly varied forms of verse--some forms
actually consisting of only two syllables to a line. With this
surprisingly short measure begins one of Hugo's most remarkably early
poems, "Les Djins," representing the coming of evil spirits with a storm,
their passing over the house where a man is at prayer, and departing into
the distance again. Beginning with only two syllables to the line, the
measure of the poem gradually widens as the spirits approach, becomes very
wide, very long and sonorous as they reach the house, and again shrinks
back to lines of two syllables as the sound of them dies away. In England
a like variety of experiments has been made; but neither in France nor in
England has the short form yet been as successfully cultivated as it was
among the Greeks. We have some fine exampl