By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
    orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.

    If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
    you are loafing?

    Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that
    minorities are always right.

    Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. 
    The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.

    I am tired of being a promising young man.  I’ve been a promising
    young man for twenty years.

In most of Don Marquis’s japes, a still small voice speaks in the mirthquake: 

    If you try too hard to get a thing, you don’t get it.

If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come—­the little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper colour—­the girl will marry the other man—­the public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can’t write anyhow!—­the cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity—­the Welsh rabbit will be stringy—­you will find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade—­the primrose by the river’s brim will be only a hayfever carrier—­and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.

But Don Marquis’s mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite denunciations).  In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart.  For instance this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany: 

    This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth
    Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... 
    As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,
    Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,
    Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb—­
    Who frowned above him, proud and grim,
    While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore
    Of fire and steel and stone and war: 
    She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth

    Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... 
    His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur.

    Tip from the wild red Welter of the past
    Foaming he comes:  let this rush, be his last.

    Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. 
    We have been slow as doom.  Our dead
    Of yesteryear lie on the ocean’s bed—­
    We have denied each pleading ghost—­
    We have been slow:  God, make us sure. 
    We have been slow.  Grant we endure
    Unto the uttermost, the uttermost.

    Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? 
    Then weld our diverse millions, Lord,
    Into one single swinging sword.

I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a newspaper.  I thought of De Quincey’s famous utterance about the press: