"The bearing of which lies in the application of it." Perhaps you may think, discouragingly, that there is no chance for you in these or any other specialties, but take my advice and try something awhile—get into a class and work to become at the head of that class; then, even if you do not attain the full measure of success you had hoped, you will certainly have the proud consciousness of having striven, and can contemplate with pity
Those green and salad days: Can I rehearse
What sweets I ate and what I put In verse?
Douglas Dane.
Boston, Mass.
CONCERNING SONNETS.
A few months ago the pages of The Writer contained some interesting suggestions as to the advisability of a uniform indentation for sonnets when printed; the writer favoring a New York method, which would bring out even the first, fifth, ninth, and twelfth lines, setting all the other lines an equal space to the right of these. I give a quatrain for example:—
"The early star, soft mirrored in the stream,
Dim vistas of the dewy forest-road,
Yea, even the solemn, high-walled glen, abode
Of mortal dust long quit of deed and dream."
The writer's chief argument for this style was, I believe, that it was used by a good printing house, and also made a neat appearance on the page; but the question at once occurred to me, What is indentation in verse for? Is it not a guide to the eye, to enhance the proper recurrence of the rhyme (and in the ode to show as well rhythm)? If we are to have a mere arbitrary arrangement of the sonnet, why not the same in a poem of regular or inverted quatrains, or of the Persian quatrain, which is now always given in this form:—
"I sometimes think that never blows so red
The rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every flower the fragrant garden wears
Dropped in her lap from some once lovely head."
Or imagine an édition de luxe of Gray's "Elegy" with every stanza printed in this style:—