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 comparatively 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