"By the brand upon my shoulders, By the lash of clinging steel, By the welts the whips have left me, By the wounds that never heal, By the eyes grown dim with staring At the sun-wash on the brine, I am paid in full for service,-- Would that service still were mine." And with these the more familiar verses beginning: "Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O Sea." "Bells of the past whose long-forgotten music." "Just for a handful of silver he left us." "Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead." "O to be in England, now that April's there." "The mists are on the Oberland, The Fungfrau's snows look faint and far." "The word of the Lord by night To the watching pilgrims came." "Fear, a forgotten form; Death, a dream of the eyes; We were atoms in God's great storm That raged through the angry skies!" And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War. Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to your taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range of literature is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand--best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have loved the highest." It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach. Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will give you a fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doing this instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English. And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne in memory. Take this from Emerson: "The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love--there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble."