But now that the recognition has come, it has been discovered that nothing is harder than to write a beautiful poem of two or four lines.

Only great masters have been truly successful at it.

Goethe, you know, made a quatrain that has become a part of world-literature: Who ne'er his bread in sorrow ate,-- Who ne'er the lonely midnight hours, Weeping upon his bed has sate, He knows ye not, ye Heavenly Powers! -- meaning, of course, that inspiration and wisdom come to us only through sorrow, and that those who have never suffered never can be wise.

But in the universities of England a great deal of short work of a most excellent kind has been done in Greek and Latin; and there is the celebrated case of an English student who won a prize by a poem of a single line.

The subject given had been the miracle of Christ's turning water into wine at the marriage feast; and while other scholars attempted elaborate composition on the theme, this student wrote but one verse, of which the English translation is The modest water saw its Lord, and blushed.
Of course the force of the idea depends upon the popular conception of wine being red.