because verse is the last thing that the public want to read. The young writer has usually read a great deal of verse, however, and most of it bad. His favourite authors are the bright lyrists who sing of broken hearts, wasted lives, early deaths, disappointment, gloom. Without having even had an unlucky flirtation, or without knowing what it is to lose a favourite cat, the early author pours forth laments, just like the laments he has been reading. He has too a favourite manner, the old consumptive manner, about the hectic flush, the fatal rose on the pallid cheek, about the ruined roof tree, the empty chair, the rest in the village churchyard. This is now a little

    rococo

   and forlorn, but failure may be assured by travelling in this direction. If you are ambitious to disgust an editor at once, begin your poem with “Only.” In fact you may as well head the lyric “Only.”

    {4}

     ONLY.

     Only a spark of an ember,

     Only a leaf on the tree,

     Only the days we remember,

     Only the days without thee.

     Only the flower that thou worest,

     Only the book that we read,

     Only that night in the forest,

     Only a dream of the dead,

     Only the troth that was broken,

     Only the heart that is lonely,

     Only the sigh and the token

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