Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/18

 sole claim to public remembrance rested upon a bit of careless rhyme written in a moment of relaxation. William Allan Butler was a distinguished lawyer, but to-day he is remembered only by some lines of society verse. Clement Clarke Moore was a learned professor of Oriental literature and the compiler of a Hebrew lexicon, but his name has been kept alive by a nursery jingle.

Poets have always been the special sport of Fortune, which delights to play with them, to whirl them aloft and to cast them down, to torment them with fleeting glimpses of happiness in the midst of long nightmares of despair, and especially to condemn their favorite children to swift oblivion and to raise up some despised and rejected outcast for the admiration of mankind. Nobody—poets least of all!—has yet discovered the formula which will assure immortality to a poem. Mere size will not do it—the most ambitious edifices are usually the first to crumble. Neither polished diction nor lofty thought will do it—most deathless songs are written in words of one syllable on the simplest of themes. Indeed, it would almost seem that the surest way is to waste no time in laboring and sweating over the fabrication of a masterpiece, but to wander idly along the pleasant places of the world, seeking love and laughter, writing a song