We have received much from Italy-inspiration from her ruins and her history-strength from her many forms, whether of law, of the church, of art or of literature. From this ocean of indebtedness, it is well worth while to pick out one little drop and study it in its solitary beauty. This is the sonnet. There is an Italian word, sonetto, a "little sound," which has given to our English sonnet its name. The "little sound" takes us back seven centuries to the Sicilian Court of Frederick II. Here in the stirring times of the later Crusades and of Papal and Imperial conflicts, there met together peoples from strange landsGreek, Jew, Arab, German, Provençal and Italian. Here sang the Provençal Troubadour and the German Minnesinger. Frederick himself was a famous troubadour. Poetry was cultivated as a courtly pastime, as an added grace to the courtier. From the midst of this atmosphere issued the first "little sound," and this, so far as has been ascertained, from Frederick's chancellor, Peter de Vinca. Faint as this sound no doubt was, it has echoed ever since. Dante and Petrarch, impressed by its beauty, took up the strain and made it strong.

But no country can be to itself a world, and hospitable, stormswept Italy was peculiarly qualified to share with the world her treasures. Her universities tempted the stranger; her battlefields lay open to France and Spain. Thus the sonnet, with many other Italian forms, found its way into Western Europe -not only filtering slowly in by the slender channel of travel, but pouring in with French and Spanish armies, and with entire courts.

England, then, through her "courtly makers" around Henry VIII., received the sonnet direct from Italy and also as modified by France and Spain. Surrey's tutor had been a student in Italy. Wyatt had travelled in Italy, and, as ambassador at the Granadan Court of Charles V., he had no doubt become familiar with Boscan's Castilian sonnets. He imitated, too, the sonnets of Gelais, who, fresh from an Italian university, had introduced them into France.

Considering the lively interest of England in her wars with Francis I. and Charles V., it would have been strange indeed if the fashion of the French and Spanish courts had not crept into the court of Henry VIII. We find the publisher of Tottel's "Miscellaney" pleading for the new style with undoubted earnestness:

"If perhaps some mistake the stateliness of style, removed from the rude skill of common ears, . . . I exhort the unlearned, by reading, to learn to be more skillful and to purge that swine-like grossness that maketh the sweet marjoram not to smell to their delight.'

The "sweet marjoram" referred explicitly to the "songes and sonnettes" of Surrey and others. Sweet to the editor of the "Miscellaney" the sonnets undoubtedly were. They were new, and their new form was sweet enough to make them strong for many years to come. But mere sweetness palls with time. And the strength of the sonnet would have waned in England as surely as wanes the sweetness and vigor of youth, if a few great souls had not breathed immortality into the form. Wyatt's sonnets were, for the most part, translations from Petrarch and Spanish and French models. It is, then, only the potentiality of Wyatt's form that interests us in English literature. We have seen its capacity recognized and proved by the greatest and many of the best of our English poets. Through it, they have expressed most musically and adequately many a single great thought of their minds.

It was Watson who, in his "Passionate Century of Love", 1582, perhaps inaugurated in England the Sonnet Cycle. Many Sonnet Cycles grew up between 1590 and 1600. As Watson's sonnets were connected and formed a cycle by reason of their common theme of love, so in many later series, it was but a common-theme principle that was the criterion for the cycle. There were, however, many series which showed real progression of thought and events. Most notable among these were, of course, Shakespeare's, Sidney's and Spenser's. Spenser's "Amoretti", indeed, may be considered the truest sonnet sequence of the decade. There is in his cycle not only a single theme, but each sonnet occupies an inevitable place in the chain of thought and events.

If to the "Poet's Poet", Spenser, is due the credit of best weaving his sonnets into a harmonious unity, it is in Sidney and Shakespeare that our keenest interest in regard to the sonnets must lie. For Sidney's "Astrophel and Stella," 1591, stands at the base of this monument of Elizabethan Cycles, while Shakespeare's Cycle, 1609, crowns it with immortality. In surveying the intervening cycles of lesser poets, we are struck by their similarity. Dwelling, as most of them do, upon the same general theme, an earthly love, they lack the consistent strength and sincerity of Sidney's; the strength, sincerity and great creative imagination of Shakespeare's. And yet, we find much sweetness of expression in the sonnets of these lesser poetsmany notes of sincerity-some passages revealing depth. Even if, in reading the cycles, we do grow weary of tracing the convolutions of the author's brain, and wish that we might instead be admitted by a straight passage to his heart, yet we are rewarded by many scattered signs of true feeling. Thus, for reading Griffin's

"No choice of change can ever change my mind,
Choiceless my choice, the choicest choice alive"

we are rewarded by his :

"When silent sleep had closed up mine eyes,

My watchful mind did then begin to muse,
A thousand pleasing thoughts did then arise."

And, if we cannot appreciate Constable's passion for beauty under the painful circumstances he depicts

"In thy beauty's brightness do I fry

As poor Prometheus in the scalding fire",

yet we can teach ourselves a new beauty by dwelling upon Daniel's

"Care-charmer, Sleep, son of the sable Night,

Brother of Death, in silent darkness born."

Griffin, too, "skillful in turning his voice to other people's melodies," has a "Care-charmer Sleep" among his sonnets.

Indeed, the phrases of the sonneteers are bandied about as freely as the themes upon which they played. Smith, following the pastoral mood in his "Chloris," incorporates into his sonnets line after line from Spenser. The beginning of his fifteenth sonnet is an exact counterpart of lines from Spenser's "June."

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"My kids to hear the rimes and roundelays
Which I on wasteful hills was wont to sing."

His twentieth sonnet also begins with familiar lines from the "Calendar":

"Ye wasteful words, bear witness of my woe,
Wherein my plaints did oftentimes abound."

Smith's Cycle was dedicated to Spenser with the words:
"Good Colin, graciously accept

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A few sad sonnets which my Muse hath framed."

"Good Colin" could not but see that in some instances he was himself that very Muse. But how could he take offense at this appropriation of his verse to Chloris? Smith was evidently a devoted admirer also of Lodge's "Pastoral Cycle". For, with Lodge, in his fourth sonnet to "Phyllis ", Smith

One pearl of pity from her pretty eyes."

But then Smith proceeds to outstrip Lodge; for he calls up "Oceans of remorse to bedew the banks where 'Chloris' lay,” while Lodge had contented himself with "rivers to bathe his 'Phyllis's' banks."

Smith's wholesale borrowing is but an extravagant example of the interchange of phrases and fancies among all the sonneteers. Indeed, they have so much in common,-they all followed so closely the style,-that we may take the work of one as a fairly good type of all. Drayton's "Idea" will serve as well as any.

Like Sidney, Spenser, and Daniel, Drayton evidently addressed his "Idea" to a real lady. In this he varies from many of the sonneteers. While some of the persons addressed by them bear

the marks of real women, conjecture has failed to stamp them. A few of Constable's are evidently addressed to Lady Rich, but some, conjecturally, to Arabella Stuart. Barnfield addresses

his "Ganymede" to a man. Many of the ladies of the sonnets, notably, Lodge's "Phyllis" and Fletcher's "Lucia", are, however, as mythical as Don Quixote's Dulcinea del Toboso. But whether the ladies were real as Anne Goodere, the conjectural "Idea" of Drayton, or as wooden as the renowned Dulcinea del Toboso, the same theme played about each. If we look at an object so long and dreamily that fairies frolic around it, what does it matter if the object be a tree or a stick?

Drayton, after the style of his brother sonneteers, was usually so preoccupied with reasoning into conventional form the phantasies that played about his lady that he had no thought for her. The power of reason these sonneteers had in its fullness. Their thinking equipment was good, and they wrote many of their sonnets by the unaided use of the same faculty that created the logicians :

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Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque, prioris."

They were so pleased, so occupied, with arranging the pretty fancies they had stored up in their healthy brains, that they failed to use the simple perception of childhood. In this connection, Drayton's twenty-first sonnet comes to mind:

"But see, for you too oft for phrase I run,

And ransack all Apollo's golden treasure,

Yet by my troth this fool his love obtains
And I lose you for all my wit and pains."

Even a fool can use his perceptive faculties, and sometimes grasps what he sees and wants. But these clear-headed sonneteers sometimes ransacked their brains, and helped the process by closing their eyes. And so their sonnets, sometimes beautifully worded and well thought out, often lost the tone which that simplest of all the poet's equipments, perception, might have given them. Drayton's sighs have never had the power "to thaw the frozen seas.

Nor can his readers, after noting all his sighs up to the fiftyfifth sonnet, according to his request, become sensibly aware of any permanent dimming of their sunlight:

"Note but my sighs, and thine eyes shall behold
The sunbeams smothered with immortal smoke."

Such passages as these were written, however, when Drayton