To sing the mistress, never fretting, Musset gives Fate, so old and gray, Too long I’ve travelled on my way, And ne’er attained her dear coquetting. To find that longing of the heart, I’ve been, like yonder swallow, seeking, Yet could not through the zephyrs dart, Nor reach the wish the heart is speaking. Adieu then, shade, with laughing eyes, Towards whom youth ever sends its greeting; Better, cries Reason, as she flies, Remembrance now, than Hope retreating. * * * * * Among the eccentricities of literature may be classed _Rhopalic verses_, which begin with a monosyllable and gradually increase the length of each successive word. The name was suggested by the shape of Hercules’ club, ῥόπαλον. Sometimes they run from the butt to the handle of the club. Take as an example of each,— Rem tibi confeci, doctissime, dulcisonoram. Vectigalibus armamenta referre jubet Rex. Emblematic Poetry. A pair of scissors and a comb in verse.—§Ben Jonson.§ On their fair standards by the wind displayed, Eggs, altars, wings, pipes, axes, were portrayed.—_Scribleriad._ The quaint conceit of making verses assume grotesque shapes and devices, expressive of the theme selected by the writer, appears to have been most fashionable during the seventeenth century. Writers tortured their brains in order to torture their verses into all sorts of fantastic forms, from a flowerpot to an obelisk, from a pin to a pyramid. Hearts and fans and knots were chosen for love-songs; wineglasses, bottles, and casks for Bacchanalian songs; pulpits, altars, and monuments for religious verses and epitaphs. Tom Nash, according to Disraeli, says of Gabriel Harvey, that “he had writ verses in all kinds: in form of a pair of gloves, a pair of spectacles, a pair of pot-hooks, &c.” Puttenham, in his _Art of Poesie_, gives several odd specimens of poems in the form of lozenges, pillars, triangles, &c. Butler says of Benlowes, “the excellently learned,” who was much renowned for his literary freaks, “As for temples and pyramids in poetry, he has outdone all men that way; for he has made a _grid-iron_ and a _frying-pan_ in verse, that, besides the likeness in shape, the very tone and sound of the words did perfectly represent the noise made by these utensils! When he was a captain, he made all the furniture of his horse, from the bit to the crupper, the beaten poetry, every verse being fitted to the proportion of the thing, with a moral allusion to the sense of the thing: as the _bridle of moderation_, the _saddle of content_, and the _crupper of constancy_; so that the same thing was the epigram and emblem, even as a mule is both horse and ass.” Mr. Alger tells us that the Oriental poets are fond of