Some Unwritten Poems of "The Pathetic"

— Adopting the theory that everybody is on occasion a poet whose felicitous single line, or even fragment of a line, deserves to go upon record, I began some time since to rescue from total oblivion such lyrical fugitives as came in my way. From the collection thus made, certain extracts, here submitted, seem to me very creditable to their unconscious or careless authors. The first of my fugitives, with all its appearance of bearing the “ professional touch,” was merely post-prandial in its origin, and doubtless has been long forgotten by its clever utterer. The conversation had turned upon the efficiency for good or ill of apparently slight and generally unrecognized influences.

Here is another verse which might have been the opening of an ode by Quintus Horatius Flaccus addressed to Postumus :

It has, however, no context, and no record save the present one ; so the reader is at liberty to add (as 1 did when the words slipped unregarded into the air) whatever seems the true sequel, in the way of wistful reminiscence or of protest at Time’s fierce haste.

Another one-line poem was the sotto voce exclamation of a romantic voyager of my acquaintance who, on a stormy night, from the deck of his steamer, recognized a beacon-light not set down in the Coast Survey:

If the foregoing have a certain literary aroma, I flatter myself that the rest I have to offer are of a quite opposite character. Such, for instance, the conclusion reached In one who was sending a series of fond messages. Impatient that words could not be made to carry the whole freight of her feeling, the sender interrupted herself with,

Such, too, the perpetual monody of an insane woman, who unconsciously voiced a common disability of our beclouded human nature : —

“ They said that my mind was too melancholy ! ”

Among these sombre canticles I recall the words of my old family physician, who had never heard of Omar Khayyám, but who spoke merely from the questioning standpoint of the medical profession, when he was wont to say, —

Also among my collection is a brief chant of leave-taking which I had from an ex-filibuster of Walker’s Expedition. A young Spaniard, mortally wounded, was heard to cry out as he fell,

A lyric of pain, briefer still and as heavily burdened with mortality, came from a sick child who, looking up into his mother’s face, crowded all inquiry into the one unanswerable word, —