—­

“Pledge me round, I bid you declare,
All good fellows whose beards are gray,
Did not the fairest of the fair
Common grow and wearisome, ere
Ever a month had passed away? 
The reddest lips that ever have kissed,
The brightest eyes that ever have shone
May pray and whisper and we not list
Or look away and never be missed
Ere yet ever a month is gone. 
Gillian’s dead.  God rest her bier! 
How I loved her twenty years syne! 
Marian’s married and I sit here
Alone and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.”

—­

“Under the wide and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will. 
This be the verse ye grave for me: 
   ’Here he lies where he longed to be. 
   Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
   And the hunter home from the hill.’”

—­

“By the brand upon my shoulders,
By the lash of clinging steel,
By the welts the whips have left me,
By the wounds that never heal,
By the eyes grown dim with staring
At the sun-wash on the brine,
I am paid in full for service,—­
Would that service still were mine.”

And with these the more familiar verses beginning: 

“Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea.”

“Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music.”

“Just for a handful of silver he left us.”

“Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.”

“O to be in England, now that April’s there.”

“The mists are on the Oberland,
The Fungfrau’s snows look faint and far.”

“The word of the Lord by night
To the watching pilgrims came.”

“Fear, a forgotten form;
Death, a dream of the eyes;
We were atoms in God’s great storm
That raged through the angry skies!”

And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War.

Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to your taste.  Then find some other verse that does.  The range of literature is as wide as humanity.  It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart.  Select what you can understand—­best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand.  “It was my duty to have loved the highest.”  It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach.  Then learn it by heart.  Learn it when you are young.  It will give you a fresh well of thoughts.  It will form your style as a writer.  That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody.  To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in good writing.  To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doing this instinctively, automatically, as other