Famous Single Poems
week, a lovely girl I had last seen radiant with happiness.”
The young poetess sat down beside the mourning girl, her own gaiety all forgotten, and did what she could to console her. She left the train at Madison feeling very blue, and certain that all the pleasure had been taken out of her visit. But she soon forgot the incident in the excitement of getting ready for the ball, she had underestimated the resilience of her own young spirits, and it was not until she was standing in her room before her mirror putting the last touches to the white toilet of which she was so proud, that a vision of that young widow clad all in black flashed before her. With something like remorse, she compared her own radiant figure with that other one bowed under its sorrow, and the first four lines of the poem which was to be called “Solitude” sprang into her mind:
Laugh and the world laughs with you,
Weep and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
It has trouble enough of its own.
She knew at once that they were the nucleus of a longer poem, tucked them away in a pigeon-hole of her brain and went on to the ball, where she thoroughly enjoyed herself.
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