| Hunt and Lee, comps. The Book of the Sonnet. 1867. | | | | II. To Edmund Clarence Stedman | | By Richard Henry Stoddard (1825–1903) |
| | (With a volume of Shakespeare’s Sonnets)
HAD we been living in the antique days, | |
| With him whose young but cunning fingers penned | |
| These sugared sonnets to his strange-sweet friend, | |
| I dare be sworn we would have won the bays. | |
| Why not? We could have twined in amorous phrase | 5 |
| Sonnets like these, where love and friendship blend, | |
| (Or were they writ for some more private end?) | |
| And this, we see, remembered is with praise. | |
| Yes, there ’s a luck in most things, and in none | |
| More than in being born at the right time, | 10 |
| It boots not what the labor to be done, | |
| Or feats of arms, or arts, or building rhyme. | |
| Not that the heavens the little can make great, | |
| But many a man has lived an age too late! | | | | |
|
|
