Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/260

 244 Writers of Familiar Verse masters and learned what they had to teach him, standing forth in time upon his own feet and giving voice to a note of his own. No one of his predecessors in social verse could be cred- ited with the suggesting of Forfeits or Candour, the Chaperon or One, Two, Three, exquisite in its certainty of execution, in the skill with which the sadness of the theme is reUeved by the joyousness of the treatment. It is the abiding quality of Bunner's familiar verse that it discloses the spirit of the true poet, even while it confines itself within the bounds of the brevity, the brilliancy, and the buoyancy which are the ham- pering limitations of familiar verse.