Lives there whom pain hath evermore passed by
  And sorrow shunned with an averted eye? 
  Him do thou pity,—­him above the rest,
  Him, of all hapless mortals most unblessed.

That needs no commentary, and it contains a large truth in small space.  Here is a little bit on the subject of the artist’s ambition, which is also good.

  The thousand painful steps at last are trod,
    At last the temple’s difficult door we win,
  But perfect on his pedestal, the God
    Freezes us hopeless when we enter in.

The higher that the artist climbs by effort, the nearer his approach to the loftier truth, the more he understands how little his very best can achieve.  It is the greatest artist, he who veritably enters the presence of God—­that most feels his own weakness; the perception of beauty that other men can not see, terrifies him, freezes him motionless, as the poet says.

Out of all of Watson’s epigrams I believe these are the best.  The rest with the possible exception of those on the subject of love seem to me altogether failures.  Emerson and various American poets also attempted the quatrain—­but Emerson’s verse is nearly always bad, even when his thought is sublime.  One example of Emerson will suffice.

  Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
    Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
  But it carves the bow of beauty there,
    And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake.

The form is atrociously bad; but the reflection is grand—­it is another way of expressing the beautiful old Greek thought that “God geometrizes everywhere”—­that is, that all motion is in geometrical lines, and full of beauty.  You can pick hundreds of fine things in very short verse out of Emerson, but the verse is nearly always shapeless; the composition of the man invariably makes us think of diamonds in the rough, jewels uncut.  So far as form goes a much better master of quatrain is the American poet Aldrich, who wrote the following little thing, entitled “Popularity.”

  Such kings of shreds have wooed and won her,
    Such crafty knaves her laurel owned,
  It has become almost an honour
    Not to be crowned.

This is good verse.  The reference to “a king of shreds and patches”—­that is, a beggar king—­you will recognize as Shakespearean.  But although this pretty verse has in it more philosophy than satire, it approaches the satiric class of epigrams.  Neither America nor England has been able to do very much in the sort of verse that we have been talking about.  Now this is a very remarkable thing,—­because at the English universities beautiful work has been done in Greek or Latin—­in poems of a single line, of two lines, of three lines and other very brief measures.  Why can it not be done in English?  I suspect that it is because our English language has not yet become sufficiently perfect, sufficiently flexible, sufficiently melodious to allow of great effect with a very few words.  We can do the thing in Greek or in Latin because either Greek or Latin is a more perfect language.