Waves and wakes.

     As, in tropic Timbuctoo,

     Water beasts go plashing through

     Lilied lakes!

   Alliteration is a splendid source of failure in this sort of poetry, and adjectives like lissom, filmy, weary, weird, strange, make, or ought to make, the rejection of your manuscript a certainty. The poem should, as a rule, seem to be addressed to an unknown person, and should express regret and despair for circumstances in the past with which the reader is totally unacquainted. Thus:

     GHOSTS.

     We met at length, as Souls that sit

     At funeral feast, and taste of it,

     And empty were the words we said,

     As fits the converse of the dead,

     For it is long ago, my dear,

     Since we two met in living cheer,

     Yea, we have long been ghosts, you know,

     And alien ways we twain must go,

     Nor shall we meet in Shadow Land,

     Till Time’s glass, empty of its sand,

     Is filled up of Eternity.

     Farewell—enough for once to die—

     And far too much it is to dream,

     And taste not the Lethæan stream,

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