At glance the eye anticipates a sonnet, following one of the fixed orders of sonnet rhymes. The end of the third line yielding no recurrent sound, the ear is disappointed and infers blank verse, while expectation is frustrated by the fourth line rhyming with the second. Did we read aright? Perhaps the first and third lines do conform to the Shakspearean order now suggested! Go back. “Age,”—“doing,” no! and we reach “page” at the end of line fifth with the suspicion that we have stumbled on a nondescript. Well, give it another chance, and begin again! This time we ask: what is it in the third and fourth lines that gives the ear a sensation as if something was struck with a hammer? Yes, “round” and its iterate “rounded.” Such sforzando does not occur in a good sonnet unless there is an idea to be emphasized, to which the mind is pointed by the ear. But we conclude that this is not a sonnet, and apatheticly scan didactic platitudes through eleven lines till sobriety is startled by the all too frank confession of the twelfth. We read it twice, to see if it is not a lapse of grammar, or a squeeze of “have drank” to meet the exigencies of rhythm, and come up from the dive of the last line thirsty to know just what image Mr. Parsons had in his mind. Was his conception analogous to that of the reporter’s who described the pretty actress as “standing on the brink of the rushing torrent of Niagara and drinking it all in with shining eyes”? Was “life’s full cup” so immense that Mr. Parsons dove therein for pearls? A pretty large cup to drink to the lees, that? Is there, as a rule, any reasonable expectation of discovering pearls or pebbles, or, for that matter, lees, in a wine cup? Was the condition so awkwardly characterized in the twelfth line—but no! there is simply an unconsidered mixing of metaphors in this short poem, that starts with the book of life, and in the last three lines introduces the cup of life, and the sea of life. The last line, by the way, is mixed upon itself. Pearls and pebbles are not found mingled, and at the bottom of the sea, notwithstanding Robert Browning’s Divers in _Pan and Luna_. Who dive for pearls do not so on pebbly bottoms. No doubt, by unluck, they often bring up valueless shells. The orders of rhythms and rhymes in a sonnet are supposed to be known to all poetasters—or one can consult the Century Dictionary. These forms should be kept in sacred reserve. Therein the poet may mold some holy sentiment or feeling—not with wandering thought: rising through the personal to the universal, or perhaps veiling the universal in the personal. If one reproduces such trite didactic thought, why not bestow enough labor to shape a pure form? By so doing the platitudes even might be polished and made to shine like new, with new metaphor.