A typical pair appeared in a number of _The Century_ (January, 1883). Thoroughly American, they show well, first the half-bantering, half-real feeling of the poet, artificial in expression, yet not altogether untrue, while her answer shows the American girl pure and simple, the conventional courtesy of the first being happily balanced by the naïve frankness of the second. “WHAT HE SAID. This kiss upon your fan I press— Ah! Sainte Nitouche, you don’t refuse it? And may it from its soft recess— This kiss upon your fan I press— Be blown to you a shy caress, By this white down, whene’er you use it, This kiss upon your fan I press— Ah! Sainte Nitouche, you don’t refuse it.” “WHAT SHE THOUGHT. To kiss a fan! What a poky poet! The stupid man, To kiss a fan, When he knows that—he—can, Or ought to know it— To kiss a _fan_! What a poky poet!” _Harrison Robertson._ Yet another American one, by H. C. Bumer, may be quoted to show a subject not at first sight so suitable to the triolet form. “A pitcher of mignonette, In a tenement’s highest casement; Queer sort of a flowerpot, yet That pitcher of mignonette Is a garden in heaven set, To the little sick child in the basement, A pitcher of mignonette, In the tenement’s highest casement.” If space allowed there are other dainty flowerets to be culled from this bunch of French exotics, which seem to be cultivated more in America than at home at present. None of our greater poets has, I think, published a triolet. The influence of this form is seen in Mr. Swinburne’s oft-quoted poem, “A Match” (If love were what the rose is); and Longfellow has an evident translation of one, although he has not followed strictly the peculiar repetition of the lines.