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 examples; but, as an eminent English editor observed a few years ago, not enough examples to make a book.  And of course this means that there are very few; for you can make a book of poetry very well with as little as fifty pages of largely and widely printed text.  However, we may cite a few modern instances.

I think that about the most perfect quatrains we have are those of the extraordinary man, Walter Savage Landor, who, you know, was a rare Greek scholar, all his splendid English work being very closely based upon the Greek models.  He made a little epitaph upon himself, which is matchless of its kind: 

  I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
    Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
  I warmed both hands before the fire of life: 
    It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

You know that Greeks used the short form a great deal for their exquisite epitaphs, and that a considerable part of the anthology consists of epitaphic literature.  But the quatrain has a much wider range than this funereal limitation, and one such example of epitaph will suffice.

Only one English poet of our own day, and that a minor one, has attempted to make the poem of four lines a specialty—­that is William Watson.  He has written a whole volume of such little poems, but very few of them are successful.  As I said before, we have not enough good poems of this sort for a book; and the reason is not because English poets despise the short form, but because it is supremely difficult.  The Greeks succeeded in it, but we are still far behind the Greeks in the shaping of any kind of verse.  The best of Watson’s pieces take the form of philosophical suggestions; and this kind of verse is particularly well adapted to philosophical utterance.

  Think not thy wisdom can illume away
  The ancient tanglement of night and day. 
  Enough to acknowledge both, and both revere;
  They see not clearliest who see all things clear.

That is to say, do not think that any human knowledge will ever be able to make you understand the mystery of the universe with its darkness and light, its joy and pain.  It is best to revere the powers that make both good and evil, and to remember that the keenest, worldly, practical minds are not the minds that best perceive the great truths and mysteries of existence.  Here is another little bit, reminding us somewhat of Goethe’s quatrain, already quoted.