and purer the love the fainter the thoughts of self. The writer who thinks in the first place of his work, and gives the second place to Nature, who holds himself her master instead of being her lover and her servant, may produce poetry that is artistic in construction and powerful in expression, but he will be wanting in one of the sweetest and most elevating influences of the poetical life.

"The English muse," says Emerson, "loves the farmyard, the lane, and market. She says with De Stael, I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force me into the clouds.'” The assertion is curiously one-sided: for the poets of this country-witness Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, Shelley, and Wordsworth-are distinguished beyond all others of the modern world for splendour of imagination and for

"Large thoughts, the mothers of large sympathies,
And tolerant forbearance:"

but this elevation of spirit and breadth of sympathy only serve to make more dear to them the common ways of men, and what we in our ignorance are accustomed to call, the common objects of nature.

THE ENGLISH SONNET.

THE Sonnet, as our readers know, owes its birth-place to Italy and its earliest fame to the exquisite productions of Petrarch. Dante, Tasso, and indeed all the worthiest poets of that land, have composed sonnets of high, some of supreme, excellence; but so readily does the Italian language adapt itself to this form of poetical composition, that the wit, the courtier, and the lover became unfortunately as familiar with it as the poet; and in the sixteenth century the infection spread with such rapidity that, as Hallam has pointed out, it would demand the use of a library formed peculiarly for this purpose, as well as a vast expenditure of labour, to read the volumes which the Italians filled with their sonnets. For our purpose, at this time, there is only one point about the Italian sonnet that requires to be mentioned. In form it is what is generally known as legitimate, that is to say, the first eight lines, called the Octave, possess only two rhymes, and the

six concluding lines, called the Sestette, never possess more than three. We may add that the poets of Italy were in the habit of closing the second quatrain with a full stop, so that with the ninth line commenced a new turn of thought.*

The revival of intellectual activity in the sixteenth century, which produced such glorious fruit in this country, led, as was natural enough, to an ardent study of the best authors of Italy, and it is impossible to read the Elizabethan poets and dramatists without observing how profound was the influence exercised over them by the wealth of fancy and imagination, of romantic narrative and history, stored up in the rich granary of Italian literature. Shakespeare, the greatest and most original writer of that age or of any, lays the scenes of several of his plays on Italian soil, and derives the plots of them from Italian sources. For one he goes to Ariosto, for another to Boccaccio, for a third to Cinthio; and if we examine with this design the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, of Ben Jonson, of Massinger, of Webster, and of Ford, we

For an interesting account of the Italian Sonnet the reader may be referred to 'The Sonnet: its origin, structure, and place in Poetry, with original translations from the Sonnets of Dante, Petrarch,' &c., by Charles Tomlinson, F.R.S. (John Murray.)

shall be struck by their common partiality for the same fountain head. It is not wonderful, therefore, that our poets in their eager admiration of Italian literature, should have seized upon one of the most characteristic features of Italian poetry, and have transplanted the sonnet to their native land. They made it their own, however, in the process, gave to it greater elasticity, and produced in this shape such gems of English art, that it would be as reasonable to complain that English watches were not genuine, because the first watch was invented by a German, as that the sonnet does not form a genuine portion of English verse, because the first sonnets were written by Italians. No doubt this idea has been encouraged by Dr. Johnson's Dictionary' assertion, that the sonnet is not very suitable to the English language; but the worthlessness of the criticism is proved by the lexicographer's miserable estimate of Milton's majestic sonnets as deserving no particular comment, since "of the best it can only be said that they are not bad." It is a significant fact, and an ample refutation of Dr. Johnson's belief that the structure of the English language is unfavourable to this kind of composition, that from Spenser downwards it has been employed, with scarcely an exception, by our greatest poets,

and this not merely as a poetical exercise, but because in certain moods of feeling they found in it the fittest vehicle of expression.*

Assuredly this was the case with Shakespeare, whose sonnets, illegitimate, or as we prefer to call them, English in form, are marvels in their wealth of thought and felicity of language; with Milton, in whose hands "the thing became a trumpet;" with Wordsworth, who often felt it

Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;"

and with Mrs. Barrett Browning, whose noble song never rings more musically or touches deeper chords of feeling than when rounded by the fourteen lines which form the compass of the sonnet. It is a special advantage of this form of composition, that it necessitates the precision of language and the concentration of thought which are of priceless value in poetry. In the sonnet every word should have a meaning, every line add to the beauty of the whole; and the exquisite delicacy of the workmanship should not lessen, but should rather assist

Readers who wish to follow the track of the Sonnet in this country during three centuries of our literature, may refer to a small volume edited by the writer of this volume, entitled 'English Sonnets. A Selection.' (Henry S. King & Co.)