See with what beauty Shakespeare clothes the bare branches of winter trees. Many times in our lives, we will think with joy of Shakespeare's words when we look at the leafless boughs of trees and remember how the birds in summer sang in the leafy bowers like choristers in a choir. Shakespeare used nine words only to give us this joy. Milton, who was a great poet, also wrote sonnets. The best known of his sonnets was written on his own blindness. It begins with the line, When I consider how my light is spent. But the most loved poem by Milton is the "Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity". The beginning of the first stanza is as follows: {233} It was the Winter wilde, While the Heav'n-born-childe All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies; Nature in aw to him, Had doff't her gawdy trim, With her great Master so to sympathize: Of Dryden, read part of "Alexander's Feast"; and from Pope's work choose the gay, amusing poem called "The Rape of the Lock". Wordsworth's sonnets are specially beautiful; we should read "Upon Westminster Bridge", and one other called "The World". His longer poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", will express for you how beautiful the world is in your eyes, perhaps more perfectly than the work of any other of the great poets. Coleridge's poem, "Do You Ask What the Birds Say?" we should read; Byron's "She Walks in Beauty"; Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind", or his poem "To a Skylark"; Keats' "Eve of St. Agnes"; Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur"; and Browning's "Saul". Listen to the music of the first lines belonging to the poems named in the last paragraph, if you still are not quite certain that there is delight in reading poetry. Coleridge's poem begins:-- Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove, The Linnet, and Thrush, say "I love and I love!" In the winter they're silent--the wind is so strong; What it says, I don't know, but it sings a loud song. {234} The first four lines of Bryon's poem, "She Walks in Beauty," are:-- She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes:-- The first stanza of Shelley's "To a Skylark" is:-- Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert-- That from heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Even this one verse by Shelley gives us the feeling of rising high towards heaven with the bird and hearing his song. The beginning of Keats' poem, "The Eve of St. Agnes", is one of the most beautiful and alluring openings in all poetry:-- St. Agnes' Eve--Ah, bitter chill it was! The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;-- Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" is a story of Arthur and the Round Table, and the great sword Excalibur. Its opening lines read:--