But how grateful, how appreciative were they for pleasant things! Having no heaven they had kindlier nearness to earth. They were brothers to the trees, streams. Among them Catullus and Propertius are most modern. In their technique, their emotional view point, there is something that startles. Their heart cry, their rebellion against time and its ravages, shiver with new iridescence, the pagan calm. It plays over their poems like rainbow-shimmer across Murano glass, in contrast to the calm of chiseled marble. Some fretful, wandering wind of modernity touched them, then made them tremble with prophetic wisdom in the comfort of their gay, Greek garden. Most sonnet writers in America, except George Sterling, overweight the sonnet line, just as in my opinion Brangwyn, delightful draftsman, when he leaves paint brush and colors, overweights the etched line. This crowding of the small, clean room of the sonnet, is the chief fault of that accomplished sonneteer, Mahlon Leonard Fisher. The sonnet line should be noble, clean, and of gracious curve. It should be pure, unvexed, like skies of great etchers, Rembrandt for example. The American sonnet writer, again excepting Sterling, who to my mind has written the best sonnets in our country, (see his _Sequence to Oblivion_), is like a pretty debutante, a very pretty debutante, who, in addition to being pretty, insists upon being brilliant, insists upon using a mouth so lovely that is evidently what God made it for, to say clever things. This is worse than mixing metaphors. It is like insisting upon putting furniture that belongs by right to a large house into one small room, one very small room, _the sonnet-room_. The world is mad about information, about knowing everything there is to know, and it insists upon displaying it. No one has courage to admit ignorance. Everyone pretends wisdom that surpasses Solomon. One should learn to wear learning lightly, as a jester his bells. And for the same good reason, to mark the ways of joy. Modern sonnet writing is becoming an exhibition of acrobatics, of how to put the greatest possible number of objects dangling, pirouetting, balancing, upon one little line until its loveliness, its clean, clear profile is obscured. Art is not made to astonish. It is not an acrobat who performs feats upon lines either long or short. It is made to charm, to ennoble, bring refreshment to the spirit. It is divine play. It is cream-skimming joy. It is plucking the invisible flower of the heart, for a moment’s showing. Assuredly an unvexed thing, from which imperfections have been taken! England did not do any too well by the sonnet in the early days when she took it from Italy. She roughened it. She coarsened it. She made it a trifle pot-bellied. She taught it to drink ale, instead of wine. She took the classic, Latin profile and gave it two round eyes and a turn-up nose.