Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/159

 is, of course, well known that the saddest poems are written by the youngest poets; that it is youth which breaks its heart over the tragedies of fate, which finds in life nothing but despair, which delights to muse upon death and even to sigh for it, and which has a generally gorgeous time playing with its emotions. It is only with age and experience that understanding comes, or at least a certain induration which enables one to defy more or less successfully fortune’s slings and arrows. Bryant wrote “Thanatopsis” at the mature age of eighteen; Keats’s first poem (at nineteen) was entitled “On Death,” and Lowell’s first one (at twenty) was a “Threnodia” with a refrain of “Nevermore!” as lugubrious as Poe’s.

Nevertheless, it is with something of a shock one learns, from the recently-published “John Burroughs Talks” of Mr. Clifton Johnson, that Burroughs’s one famous poem, “Waiting,” was written not as one might suppose in the ripe placidity of age, but in the year 1862 when its author was twenty-five years old.

Twenty-five does seem rather an early age