AFTERNOONS
WITH
THE POETS
DESÄLER
821
D46-

}
ARTES
1817.
SCIENTIA
LIBRARY
VERITAS
OF THE
| UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
TÜEBOR
SLQUARIS PENINSULAM AMONAM
CIRCUMSPICE
THE GIFT OF
The Family of
Samuel A. Jones

JOME & FRIENDS' LIBRARY
No.
SAM'L A. JONES.
65
AFTERNOONS WITH THE POETS
BY
CHARLES D. DESHLER

EXONTEZ
ΔΩΣΟΥ
دارة الولاية
Um
....
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
:
1879
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
ww by-by-q
Gift 37
the library of
Samuel A. Jones.
дай
6-23-49
A
821
ΤΟ
HENRY M. ALDEN, Esq.
MY DEAR ALDEN:
I inscribe this unpretending little volume to you, as
a memorial of our friendship, and of the afternoon talks about
men and things and books that we have had daily, for nearly
half a score of years, during our homeward rides together after
the day's work was ended; also, in the hope that it may long
remind you pleasantly of our discursive thinkings and sayings
as we sat side by side and spun rapidly through town and
country on the iron rail.
Yours faithfully,
New Brunswick, N. J.
C. D. DESHler.
·
.
E
Contents.
First Afternoon:
A Summer Vacation.-The Sonnet Defined.-Its Modern Origin.—
Early Italian Sonnet-writers.-English Versions of Sonnets by Dante
and Petrarch.—Origin of English Sonnet.-Sir Thomas Wyatt.—The
Earl of Surrey.-Influence of Sonnet on English Literature. Page 6
Second Afternoon:
State of English Poetry between Chaucer and Spenser.-The Pioneers
of English Poetry.-Sir Philip Sidney.-Edmund Spenser.-William
Shakespeare.
Third Afternoon :
39
The Elizabethan Era.-The Sonnet and Shakespeare's Contemporaries
and Successors.-Ben Jonson.-Sir Walter Raleigh.-George Chap-
man.-Samuel Daniel.-Michael Drayton.-Sir John Davies .
75
Fourth Afternoon:
The Era of James the First.-Literary Character of James.-The Ba-
silicon Doron.-John Donne.-Drummond of Hawthornden.—Thom-
as Carew.-Robert Herrick.-George Wither.-William Browne.-
George Herbert.-Transitional Period of English Poetry.-William
Habington.-Edmund Waller
Fifth Afternoon :
113
Don Quixote's Safety-valve.-John Milton.-Poetical School of Addi-
son and Pope.-Alexander Pope.-Dr. Edward Young.-New Era of
Poets.-Thomas Gray.-William Cowper.-Thomas Warton.-Wil-
liam Lisle Bowles. - Extended Sphere of Sonnet. -William Words-
worth
•
155
vi
Contents.
Sixth Afternoon :
Wordsworth's Contemporaries.-Robert Southey.-S. T. Coleridge.—
Lord Byron.-Robert Burns.-Samuel Rogers.-James Montgomery.
-Percy B. Shelley. - John Keats.- Henry Kirke White.—Charles
Lamb.-Barry Cornwall. - Charles Lloyd. — Bernard Barton.- Hen-
ry F. Cary. Thomas N. Talfourd. - Charlotte Smith. Mrs. He-
Page 213
mans
Seventh Afternoon :
Character of Love Poems by Women.-Alleged sameness of Modern
Sonnets.-Leigh Hunt.-Washington Allston.-Richard H. Dana.—
Joseph Rodman Drake.-William Motherwell.-Alfred Tennyson.-—
Henry W. Longfellow. - William C. Bryant.-John G. Whittier.-
Tom Hood.-Aubrey De Vere.-James R. Lowell.-Edmund C. Sted-
man.-Matthew Arnold.-Thomas B. Aldrich.-David M. Moir.-Rob-
ert Buchanan.—Henry Alford. Sydney Dobell.-Edgar A. Poe.
Oliver W. Holmes.-Charles T. Turner.-Blanco White
261
-..
,
First Afternoon.
:
I.
THE Professor was enjoying his vacation hugely. He was
lying lazily at full length in the shade of an oak, his head rest-
ing on an armful of newly-mown hay, his knees towering aloft
like miniature mountain-peaks, his eyes following the vagrant
smoke from his cigar as it curled waywardly among the flut-
tering leaves, and his mind half-dreamily noting, through the
openings in the branches overhead, the glintings of the white
clouds that sailed silently across the blue sky.
Whether it was from an innate love of mischief, or at the
instigation of a certain nameless personage whose title figures
largely in our common-law forms of criminal indictment, or
because I was prompted by the sight of the bow so thoroughly
unstrung, I will not take upon me to say; but certain it is, I
yielded to the impulse to dart at the prone student the ques-
tion, "What is your idea of a sonnet?"
"My dear boy," he replied, sleepily, but without hesitation,
"has it ever occurred to your matter-of-fact mind that a fool
can ask a question that will gravel the wisest philosopher?
Now, don't let your angry passions rise, as saith the divine
Watts," he added, in answer to a quick flush on my cheeks;
"my question is only the inoffensive statement of a general
proposition, and is far from being an assertion either that you
are a fool or that I am a wise man. Doubtless, if the truth
were told, neither of us is quite the one or the other. But
00
Afternoons with the Poets.
L
❤
your query, thrown at me like a stone into a quiet pool, has
stirred the ripples of my memory, and I am reminded how
often I have been made to lower the sail of my professorial
dignity by the unexpected chance question of some smug-faced
freshman, and of the fact that for all such questions there is no
answer like a figure of speech. Metaphor, my lad, is your true
definer, at once handy and illuminating."
"But," I interjected, "I do not see that you are making any
headway. I asked you a very simple question; and, instead
of answering it, you are treating me to a wandering harangue
on the easiest method for a lazy or ignorant professor to dodge
an inconvenient question. Remember, old fellow, that, if I am
six weeks your junior, I am not a freshman, nor is this fine old
oak your drowsy class-room."
"Cultivate the virtue of patience, my dear boy," he replied,
with imperturbable unhaste, as he emitted a cloud of smoke
and watched its graceful vagaries for a moment or two in lei-
surely silence. "Perhaps I may be searching my mind for an
answer, or I may be manoeuvring for time to frame a more
fit one than I could find there on call.”
"Why then not be candid, you virtuous hypocrite, and ad-
mit your ignorance frankly, instead of beating the bush about
nothing?"
"Nay, young man, now you are insolent," he resumed, in
the same unruffled tone. "Have you not yet learned to make
haste slowly, and that wisdom does not pour down knowledge
from above as the clouds let down the rain, but that it is to be
delved for patiently and with hard toil, at the cost of flinty
hands and mayhap of skinned knuckles? But now to the
point. Edmund Spenser knew how to press metaphor into
service as a definer. On a time some troublesome fellow like
Metaphor as a Definer.
9
yourself must have addressed him somewhat after this fash
ion: 'Sage and serious Spenser! what is your idea of a
steeple?' And what do you suppose was the great poet's
reply? Did he, do you think, follow the prosaic dictionary
method and reply, like a wise parrot, 'A steeple is the turret of
a church, ending in a point-a spire? Nothing of the kind;
but, instead, he most felicitously christened them 'neighbours
to the skie.' That is the way in which genius transmutes the
common clay and stubble of prose into the gold of poesy, and
makes it current for all time. So likewise Ben Jonson, instead
of indolently defining bell-ringing to be the act of causing a bell
to give forth sound by means of a clapper, by a beautiful figure
crystallized it for all after-ages as the 'poetry of steeples!""
"That is all very fine, old fellow," I interrupted; "but what
has all this rigmarole to do with my question, which I am
afraid will be lost sight of in the dust of words you are so dili-
gently kicking up?"
"If you were able to see as far into a millstone as you
think you can, my juvenile friend, you would perceive that all
the while I have been coming steadily and surely to the point.
You ask me, 'What is your idea of a sonnet?' Now, if I were
an animated lexicon, I might reply that a sonnet is a form of
verse which consists of fourteen lines of ten or eleven syllables,
arranged for the most part in two quatrains and two tercets, or
in three quatrains and one tercet, the rhyme being adjusted by
a particular but not invariable rule. But like my illustrious
predecessors, 'gentle Spenser' and 'rare Ben Jonson,' I decline
such cheap pedantry, and answer, the sonnet is the DIAMOND of
literature.'
"So! that is the prodigious metaphor for which you have
been cudgelling your brain all this while. Excuse me if I say
10
Afternoons with the Poets.
{
it is a flagrant attempt to dodge my question, under a faint
show of authority. It is no answer—it is an evasion; and as
a figure, is as little to the point as one employed on a time at
an experience meeting, by a good Methodist of whom I have
heard. He was telling how great a sinner he had been before
he was converted: 'I was an awful sinner,' he said—‘a great
sinner; I was the chief among ten thousand, and the one alto-
gether lovely.""
"Ha, ha! my boy," he laughed, rubbing his hands gleefully,
"that is a clever anecdote, a very clever anecdote, and capitally
told, but it is not as felicitous in its application as it might
be; for you must admit that my metaphorical definition has
none of the delicious blundering or of the exquisite inaptitude
which give such a fine flavor to the confession of your Meth-
odist friend."
แ
True for you, most venerable proser; I freely admit that
there is little enough in your pet definition that is either de-
licious or exquisite; but, nevertheless, I insist that it cannot be
beaten for blundering inaptitude."
"Laddie, you are uncivil, and seem to be in the mood to 'get
the itch on purpose to be scratched,' as they say in Scotland.
And I might scratch you to some purpose if I were so minded;
but how is it possible to be guilty of deliberate cruelty to even
the most insignificant of God's creatures, here, in the midst of
the tranquil loveliness of his creation. Nay, like the kind-
hearted old veteran in Tristram Shandy, I too can say, in the
plenitude of my benevolence, 'Go, poor devil, the world is wide.
enough for both of us.' Seriously though, I have other high
authority for resorting to a figure to define a sonnet, and I
greatly doubt if it is possible to be defined in any other way
so accurately, or with such multiplied and multiplying variety
The Sonnet defined by Wordsworth.
11
of meaning and illustration. Why, my dear fellow, Words-
worth-sober, russet-clad, plain of speech, and yet withal emi-
nently poetic-rings all the changes nearly of which figures of
speech are capable, when he undertakes to describe the office.
and power, and the rank in poetry of the sonnet. In his un-
equalled sonnet on 'The Sonnet' he defines it as a key, a lute,
a pipe (not of brier-wood or meerschaum, I would have you
understand), a myrtle leaf, a lamp, a thing, and, last of all, a
trumpet. Hear the grand tribute by the Seer of Rydal to this
noble form of verse, and mark how the rapidly changing fig-
ures chase each other through his sonorous lines. Here, amidst
this sylvan beauty, that would have delighted the old bard's
heart, listen to his theme:
"Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honors; with this Key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small Lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this Pipe did Tasso sound;
Camoens soothed with it an Exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle Leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm Lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery Land
To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a Trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!'"
"After hearing
"I give it up, professor!" I exclaimed.
Wordsworth call the sonnet a Thing, with a mystery-inspir-
ing capital letter, too; especially while yet under the overpow-
ering influence of the grand echoes of the dying swell of the
Trumpet with which he closes his magnificent eulogy to the
12
Afternoons with the Poets.
sonnet, I am quite ready to admit that this Protean sort of
verse may be a diamond, or anything else that's either rich or
rare that an active fancy may please to term it."
"Now that you are once more clothed and in your right
mind, your juvenility may be able to comprehend my reasons
for likening the sonnet to the diamond. Briefly, then, they
are these: that like the diamond it is brilliant, compact, the
most perfect when it is the most skilfully cut and most highly
polished, and the most precious when its rude richness is the
most elaborately perfected by art. And, finally, to complete
the simile, the perfect sonnet is as rare as the perfect diamond."
"By George! old fellow, you order your pack of metaphors
with great skill, and keep them on the track of the devoted
sonnet with as much stanchness as a pack of hounds is made
to follow the scent of an unfortunate fox. But now that you
have run your victim to earth, give me leave to interpose a
plain question: In the fine lines by Wordsworth which you re-
cited, he speaks of the sonnet as a favorite form of poetical
composition with several among the greatest of modern poets,
but he says nothing of its use by the ancients. Was it not,
then, equally a favorite with them also?"
66
No; it was unknown to the ancients, and we owe its inven-
tion to comparatively modern times. By some writers it is.
held, with considerable ingenuity, that the sonnet originated
with the Provençal poets, and was derived from them by the
Italians. But I am inclined to the opinion that the ascription
of its origin to the Provençals has its rise in the circumstance
that they wrote in stanzas of seven verses the same as was
afterward first introduced into England by Chaucer in his
'Troilus and Creseide.' It was very easy, where the unity and
completeness of the sense would permit, to unite two of these.
,
The Earliest Sonneteers.
13
stanzas when they might pass muster for and be claimed as
sonnets. The length of the verse would seem to vindicate such
a claim; but in other important particulars the differences are
so many and essential as to disallow it. Be this as it may, I
shall assume that the oldest extant specimens of it are the
productions of two Italians-Ludovico Vernaccia and Piero
della Vigne-of whom pretty much all that we know besides
is that they flourished very early in the thirteenth century.
Later in the same century, and near its close, Fra Guittone, of
Arezzo (also the birthplace of Petrarch), who died A.D. 1294,
composed a number of sonnets, and is noteworthy for having
been the first to give this kind of verse its regular and legiti-
mate form. Dante and Petrarch were both familiar with his
poetical productions; and the former, in one of his Latin trea-
tises-'De Vulgari Eloquio '-criticises him for preferring the
plebeian to the courtly style in his poetry. A capable judge,
Cary, the translator of Dante, tells us that Guittone's sonnets
were marked by a peculiar solemnity of manner;' and he cites
one of them, which he also translates, as an example. This fine
specimen of the early sonnet will serve to illustrate the degree
of perfection to which this poetical pioneer in the field of son-
neteering had brought his favorite form of composition. Thus
sings the old Italian :
6
"Great joy it were to me to join the throng
That thy celestial throne, O Lord, surround,
Where perfect peace and pardon shall be found,
Peace for good doings, pardon for the wrong:
Great joy to hear the vault of heaven prolong
That everlasting trumpet's mighty sound,
That shall to each award their final bound,
Wailing to these, to those the blissful song.
14
Afternoons with the Poets.
All this, dear Lord, were welcome to my soul.
For on his brow then every one shall bear
Inscribed, what late was hidden in the heart;
And round my forehead wreath'd a lettered scroll
Shall in this tenor my sad fate declare:
"Love's bondman, I from him might never part."
"The first poet of renown, however, who adopted the sonnet
and gave it the sanction of genius, together with the currency
that such a sanction only could command, was the great Floren-
tine, Dante. But it was Petrarch, pre-eminently, who secured
for it, by the perfection to which he brought it, and by his
large and impassioned use of it, the assured rank in poetry
which it immediately gained and still maintains. So, then,
although the sonnet may not be able to boast a hoar antiquity,
it comes of good stock and gentle lineage."
"I suspect, however, if there is anything in the ridicule
which proverbially attaches to sonneteers and sonnet-making,
that, like the 'blood of all the Howards,' the sonnet has deteri-
orated in these later days."
"Ah! my friend, there are and there always have been son-
nets and sonnets. Just as ostentatious prudery has presumed to
pass for shrinking modesty, and by its false pretence has made
some men doubt the existence of that shy, sweet virtue; just
as the glitter of worthless paste has rivalled or outshone the
lustre of the real gem, and by its successful deceit has caused
even the diamond to be looked upon with distrust, so this no-
ble verse has been made to share the doubt and discredit which
the counterfeit productions of spurious makers earned and
merited. Because small wits and barren poetasters have in-
dited sonnets to sparrows or to their ladies' eyebrows, it has
become fashionable to sneer at all sonnets and sonneteers.
The Poets and the Sonnet.
15
Nevertheless, true poets of every rank stand as loyally by the
sonnet to-day as their brethren did in times past; and they are
as eager as ever to test their powers by its severe and exacting
limitations. Since its first invention nearly every great poet,
and multitudes who were not great, have essayed their capabil-
ities on the sonnet; but it must be confessed that those who
have attained or even approximated excellence in it have been
very few. For, as the Rosicrucians and alchemists of earlier
days failed, by the most skilful combinations of their abstruse
arts, to convert baser materials into gold or precious stones, so
has it fared with those who have relied upon mere art or learn-
ing, however consummate either might be, for the fabrication
of this most difficult of all verse. The genuine sonnet has
eluded their grasp, and could only be produced from the mine
of native genius, just as the diamond is only to be found by
patient delving in the rich earth. And so it has happened that
usually a few efforts at sonnet-mongering have satisfied pseudo
or inferior poets; and, repelled by the difficulty and their fail-
ure to master it, they have desisted from the unproductive la-
bor. On the other hand, the really great poets, with many and
signal exceptions, it is true, have been the most voluminous and
successful composers of sonnets. You will remember that in
the line-
'A thousand times this Pipe did Tasso sound,'
Wordsworth intimates that the author of 'Gerusalemme Libe-
rata' wrote a thousand sonnets. Petrarch, we know, sounded
his love plaints and rung the changes in praise of Laura-of
her grace, beauty, virtue, and womanly excellence, and of his
perplexities and anguish-in more than three hundred."
"Hold! my learned friend," I exclaimed; "are you conscious.
that you have been reeling off quite a formidable lecture ?—
2
16
Afternoons with the Poets.
Why, you 'talk like a book;' nay, you must have been writ-
ing a book on the sonnet, which I have brought about my ears
by my unlucky question."
"My lad," he replied, laughing gayly, "you remind me of an
anecdote which I must tell you: In my younger days the com-
mandant of a crack military company in my native place was a
fine-looking and very intelligent tailor. The colonel, for such
was his rank, was also an influential politician, a glib and even
eloquent speaker-and when he was away from home, where
his occupation was not known, he uniformly sunk the goose
and affected the elegant gentleman. Well, this fine fellow was
visiting the city of Washington with his company, where they
won merited applause by the excellence of their drill and the
novelty and skill of their evolutions, and the colonel himself
became quite the rage because of his martial appearance and
his unquestionable military accomplishments. One day, after
his company had been reviewed and heartily praised by 'Old
Hickory,' who was then President, on returning to his quarters
with his men, our colonel discovered that his pantaloons had
suffered a serious rupture under the extraordinary strain to
which they had been subjected while he was on parade. A
number of officers of other companies, who were also visiting
Washington at the same time, had gathered at his company
head-quarters to enjoy his frank companionship and extend
their congratulations, and they were all very merry over the
unfortunate casualty. When the fun was at the highest, the
colonel, with the abandon of a genuine soldier, drew off his pan-
taloons, and, standing in his drawers, began to inspect the dam-
age. It was indeed an 'envious rent;' and as a military ball
was to come off in their honor that evening, and he was with-
out a change of uniform, he determined to mend the breach
6
A Digressive Anecdote.
(
17
without delay. So, procuring needle and thread, he seated him-
self on the mess-table in orthodox tailor fashion and began to
sew industriously. While thus engaged, his visiting brother
officers surrounded him as interested spectators, till at length
one of them, struck by something in the air and attitude of
the colonel, jestingly exclaimed, ' Why, colonel, you look like a
tailor!' The colonel sewed away in dead silence, but with skill
that seemed so remarkable that the officer again ejaculated,
Why, colonel, you sew like a tailor!' Still the colonel sewed
away without reply, exhibiting so much cleverness in the sar-
torial art that the by-stander once more broke out, 'Why,
damme, he is a tailor! Of course there was a great shout
from the colonel's men, who knew all about his avocation, and
very soon the cat was out of the bag. Now, my lad, whether
you are as accurate in your conclusions as was the colonel's
military visitor, I shall neither affirm nor deny; but I do frank-
ly admit that this is not the first time that I have given atten-
tion to the subject of which we have been talking this after-
noon.'
""
"You portentous fraud!" I replied, "don't say 'the subject
of which we have been talking,' for you very well know that
the talk has been like the handle of a jug. Still, I am fast be-
coming interested in the hobby that I set prancing so unwit-
tingly, and, if your wisdom pleases, would fain hear more of the
pedigree of the sonnet-so proceed!"
"To resume, then, where you interrupted me: Dante was
less lavish in the use of the sonnet than either Petrarch or
Tasso; but this is not remarkable, since he lived (1265–1321)
much nearer than they to the period of its first invention, and
probably did not become familiar with its rich capabilities till
long after he had begun to embalm Beatrice to a 'life beyond
+
7
ام
F
18
Afternoons with the Poets.
life' in his sublime 'Vision,' which then and for many years
afterward engaged all his powers, and precluded him from re-
sorting to the sonnet as freely as he might otherwise have
done to magnify her virtues and celebrate his love. Still,
Dante was quite a prolific sonnet writer; and it is noteworthy
that several of his earliest sonnets are in a playful and familiar
vein—the most difficult of all to wed successfully to this severe
form of verse, and seldom attempted to be so allied by other
eminent poets. For, properly, the sonnet is devoted to roman-
tic, inspiring, or ennobling sentiments; and, owing to its brevi-
ty and rigid limitation to the unfolding or illustration of a sin-
gle dominant idea, no space can be allowed in it for the gam-
bols of wit or humor, or for the play of sportive pleasantry.
A very agreeable specimen of this familiar style has been
placed within reach of English readers by Rev. Henry F. Cary,
the able translator of Dante's 'Vision,' who tells us that it was
sent by the poet to his friend and preceptor, Brunetto Latini,
with a copy of his then newly written 'Vita Nuova,' to which,
under the guise of a 'lass of mine,' he alludes in the sonnet.
As it is something of a literary curiosity, though far from be-
ing rare, I will recite it for your benefit, thus:
"Master Brunetto, this I send entreating
Ye'll entertain this lass of mine at Easter;
She does not come among you as a feaster;
No: she has need of reading, not of eating.
Nor let her find you at some merry meeting,
Laughing amidst buffoons and drollers, lest her
Wise sentence should escape a noisy jester:
She must be wooed, and is well worth the weeting.
If in this sort you fail to make her out,
You have amongst you many sapient men,
All famous as was Albert of Cologne.
Dante's Sonnets.
I have been posed amid that learned rout,
And if they cannot spell her right, why then
Call Master Giano, and the deed is done.'
19
"Another example of Dante's familiar sonnet, also translated
by Mr. Cary, is keyed in a loftier tone, and veils deep and im-
passioned feeling beneath its simple dialogue. It was probably
written soon after the death of Beatrice, to which is due the
exceedingly tender meaning with which it is imbued:
"Came Melancholy to my side one day,
And said: "I must a little bide with thee;"
And brought along with her in company
Sorrow and Wrath. Quoth I to her, "Away:
I will have none of you: make no delay."
And, like a Greek, she gave me stout reply.
Then, as she talk'd, I look'd and did espy
Where Love was coming onward on the way.
A garment new of cloth of black he had,
And on his head a hat of mourning wore;
And he, of truth, unfeignedly was crying.
Forthwith I ask'd: "What ails thee, caitiff lad ?"
And he rejoined: "Sad thoughts and anguish sore,
Sweet brother mine! our lady lies a-dying.":
"Far the larger proportion, however, of Dante's sonnets are
in his usual grave and lofty style, and are pregnant with subtle,
or figurative, or mystical meaning. For an example of this
more elevated kind, one of the finest is that in which he asks
the interpretation of a vision that had appeared to him in his
sleep:
"To every heart that feels the gentle flame,
To whom this present saying comes in sight,
In that to me their thoughts they may indite,
All health! in Love, our lord and master's name.
20
Afternoons with the Poets.
Now on its way the second quarter came
Of those twelve hours, wherein the stars are bright,
When Love was seen before me, in such might,
As to remember shakes with awe my frame.
Suddenly came he, seeming glad, and keeping
My heart in hand; and in his arms he had
My Lady in a folded garment sleeping:
He waked her; and that heart all burning bade
Her feed upon, in lowly guise and sad :
Then from my view he turned; and parted, weeping.'
"Well, Professor," I said, "after making due allowance for
the destructive effect of even the best translation upon the
subtle aroma and delicate bloom of poetry, I must still confess
that I am not greatly impressed by those of Dante's sonnets you
have repeated. In my uneducated judgment they lack strength
and loftiness almost to the verge of being commonplace."
"You are not singular," he replied, "and many persons will
agree with you, not only as your criticism applies to Dante's
sonnets but to Petrarch's also. Of the two, however, the latter
is the most open to it. Many of Dante's sonnets rise very near-
ly to the majesty of his grand 'Vision,' and none of them are
tarnished by affectation or disfigured by the presence of mere
conceits. It will reassure your modesty to know that one of
the most amiable as well as most acute and scholarly of the
English critics of a past generation, Thomas Warton, himself a
tasteful poet, was extremely impatient of what he calls 'the
metaphysical cast which marks Petrarch and the other Italian
poets.' Nevertheless, he is too just to be undiscriminating in
his censure, and praises Petrarch's better manner, while he ex-
poses its opposite, by remarking that it is exhibited 'when he
descends from his Platonic abstractions, his refinements of pas-
sion, and his play upon opposite sentiments into a track of ten-
Criticisms of Petrarch's Sonnets.
21
derness, simplicity, and nature.' Warton's estimate of the style
of Petrarch's sonnets is a fair exponent of the average opinion
of English-speaking scholars and critics. It was certainly the
opinion of a much greater poet than Warton-S. T. Coleridge—
who, while declaring that 'Petrarch was the final blossom and
perfection of the Troubadours,' and 'possessed a true poetic
genius,' did not hesitate to jot down in his copy of Petrarch
some very severe criticisms, especially of his sonnets and can-
zones; some of which he pronounces 'ridiculous in the thoughts,'
others' faulty,' and others abounding 'in conceits and Petrarch-
isms.' It must be admitted that his constant iteration of Lau-
ra's perfections, in every turn of phrase that ingenuity can sug-
gest, varied by every combination of conceits that art or indus-
try can devise, gives Petrarch's sonnets the appearance of effem-
inate make-believes. Their loquacity becomes wearisome; their
heroics pass for mere feigning; their plaints suggest a surfeit of
the luxury of woe; and even Laura herself becomes a tiresome
bore. As for sympathy-it is impossible to arouse it for such
an abstraction as Petrarch makes her, as impossible as for a dis-
embodied spirit.”
"I know precious little about Petrarch, Professor; but some-
how, when I hear a fellow abused like that, I begin to have a
warm side for him. I should like to see a 'specimen brick' of
his, if you have one at command.”
"I too," he replied, "have a warm side for a wrong-headed
but generous-hearted fellow like yourself, and will try to gratify
you. How will you have it-in the original or in a translation?"
"Now you are chaffing again, old fellow. You know as well
as I do that Hottentot and Italian are all one to me, so let us
have it in the vernacular."
"You shall have your wish; and as Warton's rather disen-
22
Afternoons with the Poets.
t
chanting estimate of Petrarch's poetry is still fresh in your
mind, my first specimen shall be a sonnet of his which Warton
cites to vindicate his censure of the poet's style, and in which,
he says, Petrarch exhibits 'the perplexities of a lover's mind
and his struggles betwixt hope and despair, a subject most fer-
tile of sentimental complaints, by a combination of contrarie-
ties, a species of wit highly valued by the Italians.' I must
admit that the specimen is in Petrarch's worst style, being
so incrusted with conceits as to leave only here and there an
atom of genuine poesy visible. Such as it is, however, it is
interesting, as being a literal translation made by one of the
earliest English sonnet-writers, Sir Thomas Wyatt, the elder,
who entitles it a 'Description of the Contrarious Passions in a
Lover.' Relieved of its antiquated orthography, Wyatt's ver-
sion is as follows:
"I find no peace, and all my war is done:*
I fear and hope, I burn and freeze likewise:
I fly aloft, and yet cannot arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on,
That locks nor loseth, holdeth me in prison,
And holds me not, yet can I 'scape no wise:
Nor lets me live, nor die, at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eye I see; without tongue I plain :
I wish to perish, yet I ask for health;
I love another, and I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Lo, thus displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.'"
"Well, Professor, notwithstanding my warm side for Pe-
trarch, caused by Warton's animadversions, I confess this spec-
imen has cooled my ardor. It has very slight merit, either as
Spenser's "Visions of Petrarch."
23
prose or poetry. In all frankness, I think I could do as well
myself."
"I should be sorry if you could not," he replied, “for it is
indeed sad stuff. Warton was not far astray when he drew the
following ironical synoptical outline of the wretched original
of this still more wretched translation: 'I am neither at peace
nor war. I burn, and I freeze. I soar to heaven, and yet grov-
el on the earth. I can hold nothing, and yet grasp everything.
My prison is neither shut, nor is it opened. I see without eyes,
and I complain without a voice. I laugh, and I weep. I live,
and am dead,' etc. Nevertheless, it would be most unjust to
Petrarch to judge him by this sonnet. Here is another speci-
men, more worthy of his great reputation, the translation being
the work of a very different hand—no less a one than that of
Edmund Spenser, whose transcendent genius, it is no dispraise
to the Tuscan poet to say, ennobled whatever it touched. The
selection is a portion of 'The Visions of Petrarch,' seven in
number, and treated in as many separate sonnets: the first be-
ing a vision of a fair hind chased by two cruel dogs, who over-
take and rend her to pieces; the second, of a stately and richly
freighted ship, while sailing gallantly on a propitious sea, ar-
rested by a sudden tempest, and driven to destruction upon a
rock; the third, of a beautiful laurel-tree, standing in the midst
of a delightful wood, and its branches vocal with the 'sundrie
melodie' of birds, shattered and blasted by lightning; the
fourth, of a fountain springing from a rock, and sounding
sweetly on its way, swallowed up by the treacherous gaping
earth; the fifth, of a phoenix, with purple wings and golden
crest, so dismayed by the sight of the 'tree destroied' and 'wa-
ter dride' that he smote himself to death with his beak; the
sixth and seventh conclude the vision, thus:
24
Afternoons with the Poets.
"At last so faire a Ladie did I spie,
That thinking yet on her I burne and quake;
On hearbs and flowres she walked pensively,
Milde, but yet love she proudly did forsake:
White seem'd her robes, yet woven so they were,
As snow and golde together had been wrought:
Above the wast a darke clowde shrouded her,
A stinging serpent by the heele her caught;
Wherewith she languisht as the gathered floure;
And, well assur'd, she mounted up to joy.
Alas, on earth so nothing doth endure,
But bitter griefe and sorrowfull annoy:
Which makes this life wretched and miserable,
Tosséd with stormes of fortune variable.
"When I beheld this tickel trustles state
Of vaine world's glorie, flitting too and fro,
And mortal men tossed by troublous fate
In restles seas of wretchedness and woe;
I wish I might this wearie life forgoe,
And shortly turne unto my happie rest,
Where my free spirite might not anie moe
Be vext with sights, that doo her peace molest.
And ye, faire Ladie, in whose bounteous breast
All heavenly grace and virtue shrined is,
When ye these rythmes doo read, and vew the rest,
Loath this base world, and thinke of heavens blis:
And though ye be the fairest of God's creatures,
Yet thinke, that Death shall spoyle your goodly features.””
"That is better, decidedly better. Yes, I call that poetry.
Why, it stands to reason that that must be the genuine article
which Edmund Spenser thought worth the labor of translating
into his native tongue for the entertainment of his countrymen.
Professor, the Tuscan is reinstated in my favor, and I have a
warm side for him again.”
Origin of English Sonnet.
25
"Ah! laddie, prejudice and prepossession are great con-
vincers. The great name of Spenser has had an enlightening
influence upon your judgment, I see. Confess now, that if I
had withheld that honored name your conversion would have
been more difficult."
66
Anything to afford you gratification, my dear old moral-
izer. Yes, I frankly confess it was the strong calcium light of
Spenser's genius, directed upon Petrarch's verse, that made its
beauties visible to me. And now, to change the subject a lit-
tle, do you not think we have had enough talk about these
Italian fellows, and that it is nearly time to inquire how your
'diamond of literature' fared among their English-speaking
contemporaries ?"
"Evidently, my enterprising young friend, you are oblivious.
of the fact that the sonnet was not cultivated by any of the
English contemporaries either of Dante or Petrarch, and had
no existence in England until a much later day. Dante was
born in 1265, and died in 1321, about seven years before the
birth of Chaucer. Petrarch was born in 1304, and died in
1374; while Chaucer is thought by some to have been born
in 1328, and is known to have died in 1400. Chaucer was,
therefore, contemporaneous with Petrarch for about forty-six
years; and yet he did not write a single sonnet, though he
drew largely in several of his poems from his Italian contem-
porary, and exhibits a minute familiarity with his poetical and
other writings. The omission is the more remarkable from the
fact that Chaucer visited Petrarch at Padua, as we learn from
Chaucer himself in his Prologue to 'The Clerkes Tale,' where he
says-
"I wol you tell a tale, which that I
Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
As preved by his wordes and his werk.
26
Afternoons with the Poets.
He is now ded, and nailed in his cheste,
I pray to God so yeve his soule reste.
Fraunceis Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethorike swete
Enlumined all Itaille of poetrie.'"
"Besides Chaucer's own testimony to this interesting inci-
dent in the lives of the two poets, there is a treasured though
shadowy tradition that Chaucer, among a train of other English
and Italian notables, was present with Petrarch at the marriage
of Violante, daughter of the Duke of Milan, to Lionel, Duke
of Clarence. Yet, notwithstanding the probable meeting of
the poets, and the more certain familiarity of the youthful
English poet with the writings of his Italian senior, Chaucer
utterly abstained from the peculiar poetical form of verse in
which Petrarch achieved his greatest renown.
When I say
this, I am not unmindful that here and there, as I intimated
when speaking of the claim of the Provençal poets to the
invention of the sonnet, by coupling two consecutive stanzas
of Chaucer's 'Troilus and Creseide,' many portions of that
poem (and indeed of other poems of his in the seven-line
stanza) may be made to bear a strong resemblance in form to
the old Provençal sonnet. The stanzas are of the same con-
struction, both as respects the rhyme and the number and
length of the verses, as those used by the King of Navarre and
the Provençal Rimers, which have been unhesitatingly classed
as sonnets by critics who attribute the origin of the sonnet to
the Provençals. In the verse of the Provençals and of 'Troi-
lus and Creseide' the stanzas consist of seven verses of ten
or eleven syllables, the only difference between them being
that the last two verses form a distinct couplet in Chaucer's
stanza, and in the Provençal are made to rhyme with the first
Chaucer and the Provençals.
27
and third. I may say, in passing, that this metre, which we
call the heroic, was first introduced into our language by
Chaucer—at least I believe there is no instance of its use by
any English poet before his time.”
"I say, Professor," I exclaimed, "does it happen to occur to
you that you have taken a goodly number of words to tell me
that the English contemporaries of Dante and Petrarch wrote
no sonnets? Why, if we go on at this rate, it will be sunset
before I am enlightened as to the time when the Italian exotic
was introduced on English soil. Pray proceed, then, having
a lively sense the while of honest Sir Hugh's admonition to
Falstaff, 'pauca verba, Sir John.'
"Truly, lad," resumed the Professor, with a benignant smile,
"the child is father of the man! I had forgotten that from a
school-boy you were ever restive under 'preaching,' and I have
been less considerate of your infirmity than I ought. Hence-
forward, I promise you, the pauca verba of Shakespeare's de-
lightfully gossiping old pedant shall be my motto. To pro-
ceed, then, as you bid me: After the lapse of more than a cen-
tury after the death of Chaucer-a century that was remarkable
for its dearth of poets and poetry in England—it was reserved
to two far inferior but genuine poets to graft the 'difficult
novelty,' as George Ellis aptly styled the sonnet, upon the stem
of our English literature. These were Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey (A.D. 1516–1547), and his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt
(A.D. 1503–1542), two of the noblest ornaments of the reign of
Henry the Eighth; but to which of them we are most indebt-
ed for the introduction of the new stanza it is difficult to de-
termine, as their literary productions were first published con-
jointly ten years after the execution of Surrey and fifteen years
after the death of Wyatt, and then without giving any record
28
Afternoons with the Poets.
of the dates when they were severally written. Wyatt was
the older, graver, and more thoughtful man—the abler states-
man, and the possessor of a more robust imagination; but Sur-
rey had a more refined taste, a more graceful and more versa-
tile fancy, and a greater facility as well as felicity of poetical
expression than his friend. It has been commonly assumed,
but on insufficient grounds, that he influenced Wyatt in his
literary compositions more than he was influenced by him-
the impression having been based on the presumed priority of
Surrey's poetical productions. This, however, is a pure fiction;
since it is certain that as Wyatt was nearly fourteen years old-
er than Surrey, so a great number of his poems, assuredly the
most of his love poems, were written while Surrey was a lad of
ten or twelve. Many of Wyatt's sonnets are admitted to have
been addressed to Anne Boleyn before her connection with
Henry the Eighth, and must have been written when the poet
was about twenty-three. In these poems, then, it is clear that
Wyatt could not have been influenced by the example of Sur-
rey, who was a boy of ten or eleven. Moreover, it is known
that Surrey had been an ardent admirer of Wyatt from his
early boyhood, long before there could have been any parity.
of companionship between them, and when Wyatt's graces and
accomplishments of mind and person were the theme of uni-
versal panegyric among his countrymen. It is therefore more
reasonable to conclude that Surrey was stimulated by the ex-
ample of Wyatt than the converse. Undoubtedly, Surrey's gen-
ius was the most brilliant; and his poetry is freer from con-
ceits and affectations, and is less abounding in commonplace
alliterations and metaphysical complexities than Wyatt's, while
it is also in a loftier strain. To him certainly belongs the
merit of having been the author of the first composition in
Surrey's Sonnets.
29
blank verse-it was in the form of a translation of the second
and fourth books of Virgil's 'Eneid '—extant in the English
language. The friends were both men of elegant and varied
accomplishments, unusually familiar with the Italian tongue,
and they exerted a powerful and wholesome influence in refin-
ing and improving the English of their day. A comparison of
their sonnets reveals that Surrey's are more graceful in expres-
sion than Wyatt's, and fuller of poetic feeling. I have now
particularly in my mind two of Surrey's which are very charm-
ing. One of them, which evinces an ardent love of nature
and a close observation of natural objects, is a description of
spring, wherein, in the language of its author, 'Eche thing re-
newes save onely the Lover,' and is as follows:
"The soote* season, that bud and blome forth brings,
With grene hath clad the hill, and eke the vale:
The nightingale with fethers new she sings:
The turtle to her mate hath told her tale :
Somer is come, for every spray now springs:
The hart hath hong his old hed on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coate he flings:
The fishes flete with new repairéd scale:
The adder all her slough away she flings;
The swift swalow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her hony now she mings;‡
Winter is worne, that was the flowers bale.
And thus I se among these pleasant things
Eche care decayes; and yet my sorow springs.'
"The other sonnet of Surrey's he entitles 'A Complaint.
by Night of the Lover not Beloved.' Listen to his plaintive
lute:
* Sweet.
+ Float, or swim.
+ Mingles.
30
Afternoons with the Poets.
'Alas, so all things now doe holde their peace,
Heaven and earth disturbed in no thing,
The beastes, the ayer, the birds their song doe cease,
The nightes chare* the starres about doth bring;
Calme is the sea, the waves worke lesse and lesse:
So am not I, whom love alas doth wring,
Bringing before my face the great encrease
Of my desires, whereat I wepe and sing,
In joy and wo, as in a doubtful case:
For my swete thoughts sometime do pleasure bring;
But by and by the cause of my disease
Geves me a pang, that inwardly doth sting,
When that I thinke what grief it is againe,
To live and lack the thing should rid my pain.'
"Thus much for Surrey. The memory of Surrey's friend,
Wyatt, the elder, has been pleasantly revived recently by Mr.
Tennyson's 'Queen Mary,' in which the poet's son is made to
figure tragically but heroically. In this drama, just as the
younger Wyatt is preparing to leave the 'gray towers' of Al-
lington Castle to plunge into the plot for Mary's dethronement,
the laureate makes him pause for a moment, 'before the mine
be fired,' and say,
"It were a pious work
To string my father's sonnets, left about
Like loosely-scattered jewels, in fair order,
And head them with a lamer rhyme of mine,
To grace his memory.'
And when the casket with his father's sonnets had been hand-
ed him by his and his father's faithful old servitor, and he is
left in momentary solitude, he soliloquizes thus tenderly of his
parent:
* Chair, or chariot.
Tennyson's Wyatt the Younger.
"Courtier of many courts, he loved the more
His own gray towers, plain life and letter'd peace,
To read and rhyme in solitary fields,
The lark above, the nightingale below,
And answer them in song. The Sire begets
Not half his likeness in the Son. I fail
Where he was fullest.'
31
Again, still later on, when his blunt adherent, Antony Kny-
vett, bursts in to announce that the insurrection has broken out,
and ten thousand men are waiting on Pennenden Heath and
roaring for him to lead them, he is found still absorbed in his
pious duty of arranging his father's sonnets, and heading them
with a 'lamer rhyme' of his own; whereupon the outspoken
retainer, waxing wroth, denounces the sonnet as nothing better
or less ephemeral than a 'flying ant,' and cries out with matter-
of-fact frankness, 'Look you, Master Wyatt, tear up that wom-
an's work there;' to which Wyatt replies, prophetically:
"No; not these
Dumb children of my father, that will speak
When I and you and all rebellious lie
Dead bodies without voice. Song flies, you know,
For ages.'
"The finest characterization of the elder Wyatt with which
I am familiar is that by Surrey, who thus describes his friend
in one of the manliest and most unaffected elegies in our liter-
ature:
A head, where wisdom mysteries did frame,
Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain
As on a stithe, where that some work of fame
Was daily wrought, to turn to Britain's gain.
3
32
Afternoons with the Poets.
"A visage stern and mild; where both did grow
Vice to contemn, in virtue to rejoice:
666
Amid great storms whom grace assuréd so
To live upright, and smile at Fortune's choice.
'A hand, that taught what might be said in rhyme,
That left Chaucer the glory of his wit;
A mark the which (unparfitted, for time)
Some may approach, but never none may hit.
"A tongue, that serv'd in foreign realms his king,
Whose courteous talk to virtue did inflame
Each noble heart; a worthy guide to bring
Our English youth by travel unto fame.
"An eye, whose judgment none affect* could blind,
Friends to allure, and foes to reconcile ;
Whose piercing look did represent a mind
With virtue fraught, reposéd, void of guile.
"A heart, whose dread was never so imprest,
To hide the thought that might the truth avänce;
In neither fortune loft, nor yet represt,
To swell in wealth, or yield unto mischance.
"A valiant corps,† where force and beauty met;
Happy, alas! too happy, but for foes;
Lived and ran the race that Nature set;
Of manhood's shape, where she the mold did lose.'"
"This has been a long digression, my dear boy," said the
Professor when he had concluded, with a bland smile, “but you
have been so patient under it, not even interrupting me by
interjecting pauca verba when I was in mid-career, that I will
now proceed with all directness and brevity.-Nearly one-half
* No affection,
† Body.
Wyatt's Sonnets.
33
of Wyatt's sonnets were translations from Petrarch and other
Italian poets; among them being versions of the 12th, 19th,
44th, 61st, 99th, 104th, 109th, 136th, 188th, and 229th sonnets
of Petrarch. The various themes that Sir Thomas proposed
to himself in his sonnets are curious specimens of the long-
winded and pedantic euphemisms of the age: one has for its
title, 'The Lover for Shamefastness Hideth his Desire within
his Faithful Heart;' another, 'The Abused Lover Seeth his Fol-
ly, and Intendeth to Trust no More;' and another, 'The Lover
Describeth his being Stricken with Sight of his Love.' Then we
have these others: 'The Wavering Lover Willeth and Dreadeth
to Move his Desire;' 'The Lover Unhappy Biddeth Happy Lov-
ers Rejoice in May, while he Waileth that Month to him Most
Unlucky;' 'How the Lover Perisheth in his Delight as the Fly
in the Fire; The Lover Compareth his State to a Ship in Per-
ilous Storm Tossed on the Sea,' etc., etc. His original sonnets
are his best, and afford a more favorable example of his capa-
bilities than his translations, in the proportion that they are
freer from conceits and are less stiff and affected.
Here are
two samples of his natural manner: the first, which has for its
theme 'The Lover Despairing to Attain unto his Lady's Grace
Relinquisheth the Pursuit,' is believed to have been addressed
to Anne Boleyn soon after she had accepted the attentions of
the King; and the other, which he styles 'A Renouncing of
Love,' marks the period when he ceased writing amatory po-
ems, and devoted his muse to productions of a graver and more
rigidly moral cast:
"Whoso list to hunt? I know where is an hind!
But as for me, alas! I may no more,
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore;
I am of them that furthest come behind.
34
Afternoons with the Poets.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow; I leave off, therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt
As well as I may spend his time in vain!
And graven with diamonds in letters plain,
There is written her fair neck round about;
"Noli me tangere; for Cæsar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”
'Farewell, Love ! and all thy laws forever;
Thy baited hooks shall tangle me no more:
Senec and Plato call me from thy lore,
To perfect wealth, my wit for to endeavor.
In blind erroùr, when that I did persèver,
Thy sharp repulse, that pricketh aye so sore,
Taught me in trifles that I set no store,
But 'scaped forth thence, since liberty is lever :*
Therefore, farewell! go trouble younger hearts,
And in me claim no more authority,
With idle youth go use thy property,t
And thereon spend thy many brittle darts:
For, hitherto though I have lost my time,
Me list no longer rotten boughs to climb.'
"Before taking leave of this accomplished statesman and
meritorious poet, let us linger for a moment over an exquisite
morsel of his in the form of a song in which he 'praiseth the
beauty of his Lady's hand,' and which is a fit precursor of the
inimitable songs of Herrick and Suckling:
* Better, or dearer.
+ Qualities, or powers.
Song by Sir Thomas Wyatt.
"O goodly hand!
Wherein doth stand
My heart distract in pain:
Fair hand, alas!
In little space
My life thou dost restrain.
""O! fingers slight,
Departed right,
So long, so small, so round!
Goodly by-gone,*
And yet alone
Most cruel in my wound.
"With lilies white
And roses bright
Doth strive thy color fair:
Nature did lend
Each finger's end
A pearl for to repair.
"Consent at last,
Since that thou hast
My heart in thy demain
For service true
On me to rue,
And reach me love again.
"And if not so,
There with more woe
Enforce thyself to strain
This simple heart,
That suffered smart,
And rid it out of pain.'"
* In by-gone times, so kind.
35
*
•
36
Afternoons with the Poets.
+
When the Professor ceased there ensued a brief pause,
which I broke by asking, "Well, Professor, now that you have
landed your trout in England, 'What shall we do with him?' as
Venator says to Piscator, in the 'Complete Angler.'"
"I reply, in the words of honest Piscator, 'Marry, e'en eat
him to supper;' which is a figurative way of saying, again using
the words of the gentle angler, that we will 'pass away a lit-
tle time without offence to God or man,' in a brief recital of
the effects wrought upon English poetical literature by the ex-
ample of Surrey and Wyatt.-Its first effect was not unquali-
fiedly wholesome. The friends had a motley host of imitators,
greatly inferior to themselves in poetic taste and ability, among
the lesser court poets of the reign of Henry the Eighth, who
faithfully perpetuated the faults of the Italian sonnet without
preserving its exquisite grace. With a few noteworthy excep-
tions, their productions were an inextricable medley of over-
strained comparisons, exaggerated metaphors, affected passion,
and dark or absurd conceits; their rhymes, for the most part,
were harsh and discordant, and their lines were eked out by
phrases that were tortured into the most unnatural inversions.
Still, there can be no reasonable doubt, as has been observed
by a judicious critic, the late George Ellis, author of 'Speci-
mens of the Early English Poets,' whose remarks embody a
felicitous summary of the essentials of the true sonnet, that
'these abortive struggles were not quite useless. In their re-
peated endeavors to exhibit with distinctness the most minute
and fanciful shades of sentiment, they were sometimes led to
those new and happy combinations of words, to those pictu-
resque compound epithets and glowing metaphors, of which
succeeding writers, particularly Shakespeare and Spenser, so ably
availed themselves. The necessity of comprising their subject.
The Sonnet as a Refiner.
37
within definite and very contracted limits taught them con-
ciseness and accuracy; and the difficult construction of their
stanzas forced them to atone for the frequent imperfections of
their rhymes by a strict attention to the harmony of their me-
tre. Although, from their contempt of what they thought the
rustic and sordid poverty of our early language, they often
adopted a cumbrous and gaudy magnificence of diction, they
accumulated the ore which has been refined by their successors,
and provided the materials for future selection. *** In a
few happy instances they anticipated the taste of posterity,
and attained that polished elegance of expression which results
from general simplicity and occasional splendor.' To which
sensible and acute criticism I will add, that what was true of
the sonnet as a refiner and polisher of our poetical literature in
that early day before the advent of Sidney, Spenser, and Shake-
speare had made it glorious-has remained true of it in every
succeeding generation. It has ever disciplined the taste and
cultivated the ear; it has always chastened, invigorated, and
given precision to language; it has uniformly trained the in-
tellect to strict habits of condensation and concentration, and
given point, exactitude, and clearness to expression. The son-
net puts a hook in the unwieldy jaws of tedious garrulity and
vagabond diffuseness; and it remains to-day at once the most
improving exercise of the tyro, and the severest and most ex-
acting test of the master in the art.”
"Verily, Professor," I exclaimed, "almost thou persuadest
me to be a sonneteer! Seriously, old friend, I have been en-
tertained and instructed; and I would gladly listen till you ex-
hausted your budget. But see! the moon is sailing up the
sky; and, leaving what more is to be said for another quiet af-
ternoon, we must be setting our faces homeward, else your good
38
Afternoons with the Poets.
wife and mine will be rousing the neighbors to search for their
lost or mislaid husbands."
it
Stay one moment," said the Professor.
"Before we go to
our wives and tea, let me repeat a stately sonnet of Sir Philip
Sidney's to the moon, suggested to my memory by your true
poet's phrase, 'The moon is sailing up the sky.' Listen to the
immortal hero of Zutphen:
"With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it bee, that ev'n in heavenly place
That busie archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-Love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of Love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I read it in thy looks, thy languish't grace
To mee that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell mee,
Is constant Love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they bee?
Do they above, love to be lov'd, and yet
Those lovers scorn, whom that Love doth profess?
Do they call Virtue there ungratefulness ?'”
When the Professor closed the last resounding line of this
delightful sonnet, he lay silent for a moment, as if lost in pen-
sive thought; then, knocking the ashes from his pipe against a
friendly stump, he rose, and, putting his arm in mine, we turned
our faces homeward with a silence that we both felt to be truly
"silvern."
Second Afternoon.
II.
Ir was nearly a week before the Professor and myself found
leisure to renew our afternoons with the poets; but we were
fully compensated for the enforced delay by one of those ge-
nial and rarely beautiful days which are the crown and glory
of our American summer. The sky was of that deep trans-
parent blue which gives an impression of fathomless depth; a
few vast cloud-cushions, hung high in air and white as virgin
silver, moved almost imperceptibly over the arched bosom of
the ether; the sun shone brightly, and with just enough fervor
to make the cool shade of our favorite oak an acceptable re-
treat; the air was crisp, elastic, so breezy as to set leaf and
shrub everywhere in motion, and yet so bland and gentle that
an uncovered babe might have slumbered safely, pillowed on
the sweet soft grass beside us.
When I reached our rendezvous, I found the Professor al-
ready there, so precisely in the attitude he was in when we
opened our chat the week before, that it required only a slight
effort to fancy that we were re-enacting some sleeping or wak-
ing dream of the past, and instinctively there floated on my
memory Tennyson's lines:
"We muse and brood,
And ebb into a former life, or seem
To lapse far back in a confusèd dream
To states of mystical similitude.”
..
42
Afternoons with the Poets.
The Professor was the first to speak. "I have often thought,"
he said, "that just as the links of the famous apostolical suc-
cession have often been upborne by some unworthy and inca-
pable chain-bearers, so is it with the poetical succession. And
yet, despite the imperfections and unworthiness of its high-
priests, true poetry, like true religion, has never quite deserted
the earth. It has always happened to both that when they
had nearly died out because of the imbecility or the infidelity
to their trust of those in whose keeping they had been placed,
some glorious spirit has come upon the stage who has fanned
the dying embers into a living flame, and whose genius has set
the world aglow once more. Ah! it was a long and cheerless
night, unblessed by a single brightly beaming star, the century
and more between Chaucer and Surrey. It is true, John Lyd-
gate (A.D. 1375-1462), James the First of Scotland (A.D. 1395-
1437), and a few other lesser lights glimmered faintly during
its earlier hours, but the darkness that followed their setting
was almost profound; and the after-period between Surrey and
Sidney was only less dreary. If we except those whom I have
named, and a few others, the poets of the nearly two centuries
that elapsed between Chaucer's last and Sidney's or Spenser's
first productions were wretched poetasters, whose verse was
'weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable,' and whose names may in-
deed find a place in anthologies, but are of interest to poetical
antiquarians only."
"Of how long duration was this later period, between Surrey
and Sidney, of which you speak?"
"Some thirty years or more. Surrey died in 1547; and the
earliest published productions of Sidney and Spenser made
their appearance in 1579. The period covered Henry the
Eighth's latest, worst, most brutal, and most murderous years,
·Pioneers of English Poesy.
43
the six years of Edward the Sixth's brief boy-kingship, and
the five years of unhappy Mary's encrimsoned and still briefer
reign."
"Am I to understand, Professor, that this thirty years of
gloomy twilight was unillumined by a single ray of real poet-
ical genius, or that during it England produced no great poet
whose works men will not willingly let die?"
"It is undoubtedly true that, generally, the poetry of these
thirty years was a dismal travesty upon the name. Mostly, it
was wearisomely verbose, dull to the verge of stupidity, over-
laid with trivial conceits or tumid exaggerations, and its phra-
seology was puerile when it was not pedantic. There were
versifiers in abundance; but there was no man of genius among
them, who, like Chaucer before and Shakespeare afterward, was,
as is the case with every true poet, in advance not only of his
own but of every age. No, in all that period, which I prefer
to style a tardy dawn rather than a gloomy twilight, there
was no great or true poet in England."
"Your verdict is a sweeping one, and it prompts me to ask,
Did these men, then, render no service to our poetical litera-
ture ?"
"That is an altogether different matter, my friend. Never-
theless, I reply without hesitation that, notwithstanding their
inferiority, the poets of that day did render large and substan-
tial service to English poesy; for they were the industrious
and enterprising pioneers of the new thought and the new lit-
erature that was to burst into glorious bloom in the reign of
Elizabeth. They cleared away the rubbish and underbrush
that impeded the way, exposed its tangles and pitfalls, and by
patient labor expended on sterile spots of soil they marked out
what was unproductive, and to be avoided by those who came
44
Afternoons with the Poets.
after, and led them to dig in 'fresh fields and pastures new.'
They encountered difficulty with incommensurate means for
overcoming it, and by their very failures developed, polished,
enriched, and tested the powers of our language. No, most
emphatically no; badly as they wrote, they did not write in
vain."
"You excite my curiosity to know something more of this
advance guard of our modern poetry. Tell me of some of the
more notable among them."
(6
They are soon told, my friend. There was John Heywood,
called in his day, by way of distinction, the epigrammatist. He
was court-jester to Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary,
and has the credit of having been the first writer of English
comedy, and among the first of our dramatists who drove the
Bible from the stage, and introduced representations of famil-
iar life and manners in its stead; but his poetry was sad stuff.
Then there was Sir Francis Bryan, a writer of passionate songs
and sonnets, in which, after the fashion of that day, he bewailed
and bemoaned the perplexities of love; and his friend, George
Boleyn, Lord Rochford, brother of Anne Boleyn, who was the
idol of the ladies of the court of his bloody-minded brother-in-
law and murderer, and who has left some songs and sonnets
that sparkle with a certain grace and vivacity. And then we
have good Thomas Tusser, an honest, homely, but desperately
long-winded rhymer, whose 'Five Hundred Points of Good
Husbandry' is a literary curiosity, remarkable for its quaint
common-sense, its copious collection of contemporary saws and
proverbs, and its faithful presentation of the rural customs,
habits, and pursuits of his day. To this period also belong
George Gascoigne, author of the first prose comedy in our lan-
guage, and of the second of our tragedies in blank-verse; and
Lindsay and Buckhurst.
45
Sternhold and Hopkins, whose metrical version of the Psalms
so long held the undisputed supremacy in the psalmody of the
Church of England; and Sir David Lindsay, the Scottish poet,
who was remarkable for the facility and elegance of the versi-
fication of several of his poems, as also for the dignity and
beauty of many of his descriptive passages, but who dwells in
my mind chiefly because of some quaint lines of his, in which
he makes it a principal enjoyment of the righteous in heaven
to see the torments of the damned, thus:
They sall rejoysis to se the great dolour
Of dampnit folk in Hell, and thair torment
Because of God it is the just jugement.'
Greater than all the rest, however, was Thomas Sackville, Lord
Buckhurst. He was eminent as a statesman, and it was his
misfortune late in life to act as one of the commissioners who
tried Mary Queen of Scots, to communicate her sentence to
her, and to be present at her execution. His poems, especially
his 'Mirror for Magistrates' and his tragedy of 'Gorboduc,'
have great merits his verse being flowing, musical, and
freighted with fine thoughts; his style lofty, and his allegory
so rich and imaginative as to have been thought worthy of im-
itation by Spenser, who addressed a sonnet to him, prefixed
to the 'Faerie Queene,' in which his verse is styled 'golden,'
and 'worthy of immortal fame.' Besides this, with his friend,
Thomas Norton, he was joint author of our first regular trage-
dy. Last of all, and least worthy, was Henry the Eighth him-
self, who diversified the brief intervals of his studies in polem-
ical divinity and queen-killing, by trying his 'prentice hand on
poetry. That he did so with indifferent success is rendered
probable by the silence of contemporary flatterers, and by the
46
Afternoons with the Poets.
fact that all that he wrote found a grave in the shortest of
short memories. All that we really know of it is told in few
words by Thomas Warton,* when he says, 'I have been told
that the late Lord Eglintoun had a genuine book of manuscript
sonnets written by King Henry the Eighth.' I might name
half a score or more of these honorable toilers of that age,
some of whom showed occasional sparkles of grace and vigor;
but for the most part they are chiefly remarkable for having
maintained with wonderful success the dead level of prosaic
flatness."
66
To come back to the sonnet, Professor, did any of these
forgotten worthies write sonnets ?"
"My dear fellow, they wrote them by the cord, on the small-
est provocation; but, like those of Henry the Eighth, they have
nearly all been hidden away in unremembered corners. Let
them rest. We will not stir the dust of centuries that has set-
tled upon them, but piously leaving them to their silent repose,
will turn from the dead to the living. Among these I class
Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586) and Edmund Spenser (1553–
1598), who first brought the sonnet to comparative perfection
in our tongue, and exhibited its powers by more numerous ex-
amples than any of their immediate contemporaries, save only
Shakespeare (1564-1616), who, strictly speaking, was a genera-
tion later than they. Which of the two, Sidney or Spenser,
was the first cultivator of the sonnet, it is hard to decide.
Spenser certainly wrote some verse, which he himself consid-
ered immature, prior to 1579, among which were translations
of eleven sonnets of Bellay, the French Ovid, as early as 1569,
and still extant; and a version of Petrarch's 'Visions' about
* "History of English Poetry," vol. iii., section 21.
'
Sidney and Spenser.
47
1576-'77, which he afterward cancelled, and replaced by the
translation we now have. He was personally and intimately
acquainted with Sir Philip for a year or two earlier than 1579,
and in that year published the 'Shepheards Calender,' a portion
of which was written at Penshurst, Sidney's family seat, and
dedicated it to Sir Philip. The 'Faerie Queene' was not pub-
lished till 1589, three years after Sidney's death, though the
three first books had been seen and applauded by him while
it was in preparation. Those of Spenser's sonnets which are
translations from Bellay and Petrarch, and which he suffered
to remain uncancelled-except the eleven from Bellay written
in 1569—were first published in 1591; and his own original
sonnets, or 'Amoretti,' were written in 1591, 1592, and 1593,
and published in 1595. The whole number of Spenser's son-
nets, original and translated, was one hundred and eighty, and
of these eighty-eight or ninety were original. In this estimate
the seventeen sonnets are not included which are prefixed to
the 'Faerie Queene,' and addressed by Spenser to several noble-
men. If then we except the eleven sonnets of 1569 from Bel-
lay, and the seven of the suppressed version of Petrarch's ‘Vi-
sion,' we may conclude with reasonable certainty that the great
body of his sonnets were written after Sidney's death in 1586.
If it is further considered that Sidney's phenomenal intellect
matured earlier than Spenser's, notwithstanding the brilliant ge-
nius of the latter, I shall not err greatly if I assume though
I wish you to understand that I do not do so dogmatically—
that Sidney's sonnets, having been written by or before 1584,
antedated Spenser's; from which, let me add, they differ in be-
ing almost entirely original compositions. Many of them are
exquisitely conceived, and some of them have been pronounced
by a modern critic, usually severe almost to surliness,' the finest
4
48
Afternoons with the Poets.
examples in this species of composition that the world can pro-
duce.' I am not prepared, however, to adopt this criticism with-
out reserve, since it is impossible to conceal that Sidney, whom
Raleigh styled' the English Petrarch,' did certainly derive many
of his faults as well as graces from his too close study of the
bard of Arezzo. Among these faults are to be reckoned his
occasional tendency to classical pedantry, his proneness to con-
ceit and antithesis, his exaggerated turns of expression, and his
far-fetched allusions and incongruous metaphors. Still, after
making every deduction for these unquestionable defects, the
fact remains, as has been judiciously remarked by his accom-
plished critic and biographer, William Gray, Esq., that Sidney
'liberally compensated for his occasional aberrations from true
taste by frequent displays of a degree of elegance and facility
to which few of his contemporaries, in the same species of writ-
ing, have succeeded in establishing any claim. *** If his
sonnets possessed no other merit, it is in them that his various
feelings, as they arose in his heart, are distinctly to be traced,
and that we learn the peculiarities by which his heroic charac-
ter was discriminated and shaded.'"
"I am totally unprepared, Professor," I interposed, "to point.
out the weak spots, if there be any, in your learned disquisi-
tion; nor do I regret my inability to do so, for I very cordially
own that, like all the world besides, I have always loved to sur-
render myself implicitly to the tradition of Sidney's unparal-
leled accomplishments, and to contemplate him as the ideal
model and exemplar of heroism, chivalry, courtesy, and excel-
lence of every kind. Any praise you may lavish on this peer-
less hero, or any distinction you may assign to this mirror of
knighthood-infinitely worthier than the Chevalier Bayard of
the motto, 'Sans puer et sans reproche' will give me the
-
•
Sidney's Sonnets.
49
keenest pleasure. I am now in the mood for some examples of
his handiwork; but I warn you that my expectations have been
raised to a high pitch by the remembrance of his invocation to
the moon, with which we brought our last afternoon to a fitting
close."
"I hope Sir Philip may not disappoint your expectations,
nor do I think he will. I shall present to you five strongly
contrasted specimens of his workmanship: the first, discrimi-
nating between the influence of the study of books and of the
heart to give tone and voice to the poetic faculty; the second,
supplying an example of his amatory style; the third and
fourth, exhibiting his reaction from the passion of love; and
the last being a charming invocation to and description of
Sleep. Listen to his changeful melody:
"Loving in truth, and fain in vers my love to show,
That shee (dear shee) might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might caus her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledg might pitie win, and pitie grace obtain :
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of wo,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunburned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention's stay;
Invention, Nature's childe, fled step-dame Studie's blows,
And others' feet still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with childe to speak, and helpless in my throws,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
Fool! said my Muse to mee, look in thy heart, and write.'
"Stella! think not that I by vers seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history!
If thou prais not, all other prais is shame.
50
Afternoons with the Poets.
Nor so ambitious am I as to frame
A nest for my young prais in Laurel-tree:
In truth, I swear, I wish not there should bee
Grav'd in my epitaph a poet's name:
Ne if I would, I could just title make,
That any laud to mee thereof should grow,
Without my plumes from others' wings I take.
For nothing from my wit or will doth flow,
Since all my words thy beautie doth endite,
And Love doth hold my hand, and makes mee write.'
"Thou blind man's mark; thou fool's self-chosen snare,
Fond fancy's scum, and dregs of scatter'd thought:
Band of all evils; cradle of causeless care;
Thou web of will, whose end is never wrought;
Desire! Desire! I have too dearly bought,
With price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware;
Too long, too long, asleep thou hast me brought,
Who shouldst my mind to higher things prepare;
But yet in vain thou hast my ruin sought;
In vain thou mad'st me to vain things aspire;
In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire:
For virtue hath this better lesson taught,
Within myself to seek my only hire,
Desiring naught but how to kill Desire.'
"Leave me, O love! which reaches but to dust;
And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things:
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might
To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be,
Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light,
That doth both shine, and give us sight to see.
O take fast hold! let that light be thy guide,
In this small course which birth draws out to death,
Sidney's Sonnet to Sleep.
And think how evil becometh him to slide
Who seeketh heav'n, and comes of heav'nly birth.
Then farewell, world, thy uttermost I see,
Eternal Love, maintain thy life in me.'
"Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,
Th' indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof, shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts, despair at me doth throw :
O make in me those civil wars to cease;
I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.
Take thou of me, smooth pillows, sweetest bed;
A chamber deaf to noise, and blind to light;
A rosy garland, and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine by right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt, in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see.
51
"I am charmed, Professor, by the vigor and gracefulness of
these lines. They seem to me to have every ingredient of gen-
uine poetry—ease and elegance combined with strength and
simplicity of diction, depth and variety of feeling, and a refined
and active fancy. And I am amazed that I should have re-
mained so long in ignorance of their hidden beauties, for in all
beside his poetry my admiration of Sidney barely stops short
of idolatry. Nor have I been unfamiliar with his writings. I
have found many an hour of dreamy, tranquil pleasure, such as
one experiences in listening to the rippling murmur of a sum-
mer brook, when reading his pastoral prose poem, the ‘Arca-
dia;' and I have read and re-read with increasing admiration
his manly eulogy and criticism of poetry in his 'Defence of
Poesy.' But his sonnets, I may as well confess, have repelled
52
Afternoons with the Poets.
+
me; for hitherto I have been biassed by an impression that the
sonnet is merely a form of literary trifling, not differing much
from a conundrum in verse. I promise you to regard them
differently in future.”
“Ah, old friend, you are like the rest of the world. Few,
even among those who affect to be thought 'literary,' are fa-
miliar with Sidney's sonnets; and it has happened on several
occasions that when I have asked one of these if he had read
'Astrophel and Stella'—the title of Sidney's collected songs
and sonnets-the reply showed me that it was thought I was
speaking of some new novel.”
"Let me ask you, Professor, how many sonnets are contained
in that collection, and also how they compare with those you
just now recited ?”
"In 'Astrophel and Stella' there are one hundred and eight
sonnets, besides a number of songs; but in addition to these
he wrote sixteen others, chiefly amatory, which are to be found
among his 'Miscellaneous Poems.' Some of these last, to which
the two renouncing desire belong, are of decided merit. In re-
ply to your other question, I remark that, although all the son-
nets in 'Astrophel and Stella' are not as fine as those to which
you have listened, still these are fair specimens, and were not
selected because of their exceptional quality. Others among
them are as good as these, some are superior to them, and some
again are decidedly inferior; but I can assure you there is not
one in the collection which will not reward the reader by some
gentle, or graceful, or noble thought, some happy turn of ex-
pression, or some pleasing flight of fancy. Moreover, they are
all models of pure and unaffected English: their orthography
is greatly in advance of the time when they were written, and
needs the slightest revision only to make it conform to our
!
Sidney's Verse inspired by Stella.
53
modern standard; and they are freer from the admixture of
foreign and antiquated expressions, then so much in vogue,
than almost any other productions of that period, save those
of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Raleigh."
"Do you not think, Professor, that Sidney marred the oth-
erwise almost perfect beauty of his invocation to Sleep by the
trivial compliment to Stella in the concluding couplet? To
me, it wears the appearance of an anti-climax."
"Your criticism is just, and I can offer no defence but the
imperfect one, that the sonnet in question was one of a series
addressed to and in praise of Stella. Spenser tells us in a
tender elegy, entitled 'Astrophel,' which he wrote on Sidney's
death, how exclusively the hero's muse was devoted to this, his
first love. Says Spenser:
"Stella, the faire, the fairest star in skie,
As faire as Venus or the fairest faire,
(A fairer star saw never living eie,)
Shot her sharp pointed beames through purest aire.
Her did he love, her he alone did honor,
His thoughts, his rimes, his songs were all upon her.
To her he vowd the service of his daies,
On her he spent the service of his wit:
For her he made hymnes of immortal praise,
Of onely her he sung, he thought, he writ.
Her, and but her, of love he worthie deemed;
For all the rest but little he esteemed.'
If the lines to Sleep had been an independent sonnet—as were
the stately ones to Desire-this blemish might not have oc-
curred. And yet it must be remembered that Sidney did not
place a high value on poetical renown. Protestations to this
effect are profusely strewn over all his poems. For this rea-
54
Afternoons with the Poets.
son, and often apparently solely to emphasize his indifference
to applause, he intentionally belittled some of his most ambi-
tious poetical productions. Though it does not cure these de-
fects, or excuse his low estimate of poetical fame, yet it in a
measure accounts for both to say that Sidney was essentially a
man of action and affairs, a far-reaching and sagacious soldier
and statesman, to whom poetry was a pastime in which he in-
dulged in the intervals of his leisure from more engrossing, and,
in his estimation, nobler pursuits."
"I cannot tell you, Professor, how loth I am to turn away
from the contemplation of this 'soldier's, scholar's, courtier's
eye, tongue sword,' of whom I remember Tom Nash wrote with
unwonted pathos for his railing pen, ‘Gentle Sir Philip Sidney,
thou knewest what belonged to a scholar; thou knewest what
pains, what toil, what travel, conduct to perfection: well couldst
thou give every virtue his encouragement, every art his due, ev-
ery writer his desert, cause none more virtuous, witty, or learn-
ed than thyself. But thou art dead in thy grave, and hast left
too few successors of thy glory, too few to cherish the sons
of the muses, or water those budding hopes with their plenty,
which thy bounty erst planted.' But we too must even say
farewell to 'gentle Sir Philip,' else the afternoons that are left
will be all too few for what remains to be told of his favorite,
the sonnet."
"It will not be a violent transition," said the Professor,
"from Sidney to Spenser; for he was of the same gentle and
exalted strain, and was loved and befriended by him. Spen-
ser's sonnets, like Sidney's, were almost exclusively of love;
and, with the exception of those that were translations, were
also, again like Sidney's, solely in honor of or addressed to the
woman he loved; but whom, more fortunate than Sidney, he
Relation of the Sonnets and "Epithalamion." 55
afterward won to be his wife. Those sonnets which are pe-
culiarly Spenser's own were collected by him under the title
'Amoretti,' and, together with his matchless nuptial song, 'Epi-
thalamion,' were published in one volume. This poem, the
most ornately beautiful in the language, he tells us, in 'The
Faerie Queene,' is a 'song of joy and jollity;' and he thus de-
scribes the purpose for which it was written, in a sort of epi-
logue which forms its closing lines:
Song! made in lieu of many ornaments,
With which my Love should duly have been dect,
Be unto her a goodly ornament,
And for short time an endlesse moniment !'
In the sonnets which precede and usher in this glorious song
Spenser gives a history of his courtship, in the course of which
he recites the traits and perfections of his mistress, describes
the progress of his love and the emulation for her favor, and
depicts the alternations of his hopes and fears, till at length
fear is vanquished by hope, the dark clouds are driven from his
sky, and his soul is radiant with light and brightness. Then
comes the 'Epithalamion,' fitting complement to the sonnets,
breathing an ecstasy of gladness and bursting into an exultant
strain of joy and triumph upon the happy termination of his
wooing, in which he calls on muses, and nymphs, and dryads,
and maidens of every degree, and all nature, animate and inani-
mate, to resound the praises of his Love, the while decking her
with garlands and strewing her way with flowers, as they sing
to her 'songs of joy and pleasure,' so 'that all the woods shall
answer, and theyr eccho ring.' The Sonnets and the Epitha-
lamion should always be read together, the latter being as nec-
56
Afternoons with the Poets.
essary a sequence to the former as the marriage it celebrates is
to honorable courtship."
"I suppose I ought to be ashamed, Professor, to act the part
of a chronic questioner so persistently as I do, but then I know
you will say that this is a privilege of curiosity and ignorance.
So, to be consistent with myself, let me ask, How do Spenser's
sonnets compare with Sidney's?"
"To answer that question as it deserves, my friend, would
require a longer and more careful analysis and comparison of
the productions of the two poets than is now possible or de-
sirable. It will be enough to say, in the briefest and most
general way, that, as regards their exterior form, the sonnets of
Sidney have a superiority over those of his friend in the quali-
ties of greater simplicity, purity, and precision of language, and
in their comparative freedom from archaisms and forms of ex-
pression that even in that day were considered antiquated or
obsolete; while, on the other hand, Spenser's rhymes are more
musical, and his verse flows more evenly, though not with
greater facility. Both are addicted in almost equal degree to
the play on words, the smart conceits, and the false refinements
of phrase, which were then thought to belong to the sonnet as
if by a special license, and from which it did not liberate itself
till a much later period. As to their interior spirit, there is
little to choose between them. But it may be said that Sid-
ney's sonnets are the most intellectual, Spenser's the most
graphic and realistic. Sidney discriminates more clearly than
Spenser the operations of the mind — thoughts, ideas, senti-
ments, emotions, and all those abstract qualities that have their
rise in the brain or the heart. But Spenser paints better than
Sidney: his Elizabeth is less of an angel and more of a woman
than Sidney's Stella; her beauty is more sensuous, more be-
Spenser's Sonnets and other Poems compared. 57
witching, more ornate than Stella's; we know the color of her
hair and eyes, we are familiar with her port and bearing, we
have even had a glimpse of her 'fayre bosome,' the 'nest of
love, the lodging of delight.' So also Spenser's descriptions of
natural objects-of birds, flowers, and trees-of the sky, the
earth, the water-of sunrise and sunset, and of the seasons—
are richer, warmer, truer than Sidney's, and far more fre
quent."
"One other question, Professor, and then we will listen to
some of Spenser's sonnets: How does Spenser compare with
himself? Are his sonnets the equal in poetical merit of his
other poems ?""
"They are not equal to either the 'Epithalamion' or 'The
Faerie Queene' in splendor of imagery, in glow of color or
warmth of description, in grandeur and elevation of imagina-
tion, or in perfection of musical cadence. But if we exempt
from the comparisons the nuptial song, and that wonderful
'continued Allegory, or darke Conceit,' as Spenser himself styled
'The Faerie Queene,' it may then be justly said that his sonnets
are fully equal in poetical merit to any other of his produc-
tions, and are superior to 'The Shepheards Calender,' ' Colin
Clouts Come Home Again,' and 'Mother Hubberds Tale.'"
"Thank you, Professor, I am now ready to listen to Spen-
ser's 'oaten reed.'"
“I have selected seven of his sonnets for your entertain-
ment. Of these, the first four afford glimpses of the perfec-
tions of his mistress, the fifth reveals her name, the sixth is
a bitter imprecation directed against one who had slandered
him to her, and the seventh and last, taken from the dedicatory
sonnets prefixed to 'The Faerie Queene,' is a noble tribute of
love and friendship to Sir Walter Raleigh:
58
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Rudely thou wrongest my deare harts desire,
In finding fault with her too portly pride :
The thing which I doo most in her admire,
Is of the world unworthy most envide;
For in those lofty lookes is close implide,
Scorn of base things, and sdeigne of foul dishonor;
Thretning rash eies which gaze on her so wide,
That loosely they ne dare to looke upon her.
Such pride is praise; such portlinesse is honor;
That boldned innocence beares in her eies;
And her faire countenance like a goodly banner,
Spreds in defiaunce of all enemies.
Was never in this world ought worthy tride,
Without some spark of such self-pleasing pride.
"What guyle is this, that those her golden tresses
She doth attyre under a net of gold;
And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses,
That which is gold, or haire, may scarse be told?
Is it that mens frayle eies, which gaze too bold,
She may entangle in that golden snare;
And, being caught, may craftily enfold
Their weaker harts, which are not wel aware ?
Take heed therefore, myne eies, how ye doe stare
Henceforth too rashly on that guilefull net,
In which if ever ye entrapped are,
Out of her bands ye by no means shall get.
Fondnesse it were for any, being free,
To covet fetters, though they golden bee!
"The glorious pourtraict of that Angels face,
Made to amaze weake mens confused skil,
And this worlds worthlesse glory to embase,
What pen, what pencill, can expresse her fill?
For though he colours could devize at will,
And eke his learned hand at pleasure guide,
Spenser's Sonnets.
Least, trembling, it his workmanship should spill;
Yet many wondrous things there are beside:
The sweet eye-glaunces, that like arrowes glide;
The charming smiles, that rob sence from the hart;
The lovely pleasance; and the lofty pride;
Cannot expressed be by any art.
A greater craftesmans hand thereto doth neede,
That can expresse the life of things indeed.
"Fayre is my Love, when her fayre golden haires
With the loose wynd ye waving chance to marke;
Fayre, when the rose in her red cheekes appeares;
Or in her eyes the fyre of love does sparke.
Fayre, when her brest, like a rich laden barke,
With pretious merchandize she forth doth lay;
Fayre, when that cloud of pryde, which oft doth dark
Her goodly light, with smiles she drives away.
But fayrest she, when so she doth display
The gate with pearles and rubyes richly dight;
Throgh which her words so wise do make their way
To beare the message of her gentle spright.
The rest be works of Nature's wonderment;
But this the work of hart's astonishment.
"Most happy letters! fram'd by skillful trade,
With which that happy name was first desyned,
The which three times thrise happy hath me made,
With guifts of body, fortune, and of mind.
The first my being to me gave by kind,
From Mothers womb deriv'd by dew descent:
The second is my sovereigne Queene most kind,
That honour and large richesse to me lent;
The third, my Love, my lives last ornament,
By whom my spirit out of dust was raysed:
To speake her prayse and glory excellent,
Of all alive most worthy to be praysed.
59
60
Afternoons with the Poets.
Ye three Elizabeths! forever live,
That three such graces did unto me give.
"Venemous tongue, tipt with vile adders sting,
Of that self kynd with which the Furies fell
Their snaky heads doe combe, from which a spring
Of poysoned words and spightfull speeches well;
Let all the plagues, and horrid paines, of hell
Upon thee fall for thine accursed hyre;
That with false forged lyes, which thou didst tell,
In my true Love did stirre up coles of yre;
The sparkes whereof let kindle thine own fyre,
And, catching hold on thine own wicked hed,
Consume thee quite, that didst with guile conspire
In my sweet peace such breaches to have bred!
Shame be thy meed, and mischiefe thy reward,
Due to thy selfe, that it for me prepard!
"To thee, that art the Sommers Nightingale,
Thy soveraine Goddesses most deare delight,
Why doe I send this rusticke Madrigale,
That may thy tunefull eare unseason quite?
Thou onely fit this Argument to write,
In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bowre,
And dainty Love learn'd sweetly to endite.
My rimes I know unsavory and sowre,
To tast the streames that, like a golden showre,
Flow from thy fruitfull head of thy Love's praise;
Fitter perhaps to thonder martiall stowre,
Whenso thee list thy lofty Muse to raise:
Yet, till that Thou thy Poeme wilt make knowne,
Let thy faire Cinthias praises be thus rudely showne."
"Now, then, for Shakespeare, Professor, for I know that he
wrote sonnets; though, to my shame be it said, that owing to my
indifference for the entire species, I have never read one of them.”
་
Estimates of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
61
"Jove! what a treat you have in store!" he exclaimed,
springing from the grass in unwonted excitement, and rubbing
his hands with lively satisfaction as he paced quickly back and
forth. "Why, it is as if one had whispered in your ear, 'See!
a new work by Shakespeare,' and you were now about to open
and read it for the first time. How I envy you the enjoyment
that is in reserve for you, and how I covet the ignorance that
makes this enjoyment possible! But, if I cannot share in your
new-found delight, I may enhance it by giving you in advance
some inkling of these compositions with which Shakespeare
'unlocked his heart,' just as the gourmand finds an anticipatory
relish in listening to a description of the luxuries that await
him. And first of all, hearken to what Wordsworth, ordinari-
ly so cold and judicial, has to say of these untasted viands.
Speaking of these sonnets, this is what he says: "There is not
a part of the writings of this Poet where is found in equal
compass a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously ex-
pressed;' and then, to show that his praise was not a mere
complimentary and unmeaning generalization, he particularizes
as noteworthy for their various merits of thought and lan-
guage' the sonnets numbered in the collection 27, 29, 30, 32,
33, 54, 64, 66, 68, 73, 76, 86, 91, 92, 93, 97, 98, 105, 107, 108,
109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117, 129, and many others.' So, also,
another poet, who was as pre-eminent for the absoluteness of
his taste, and the subtilty and accuracy of his critical percep-
tiveness, as he was for his poetic sensibility, Coleridge, declares
that, 'These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so
many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion
which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a
variety of expression continuous, if you regard the lover's
soul-distinct, if you listen to him as he heaves them, sigh af-
t.
62
Afternoons with the Poets.
ter sigh. These sonnets, like the Venus and Adonis, and the
Rape of Lucrece, are characterized by boundless fertility and
labored condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness
in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding
of a great poet.""
66
"So! I infer from Coleridge's use of the phrase 'budding
poet,' in association with Shakespeare's sonnets, that they must
have been the offspring of his earlier years and unripe powers."
Although Coleridge has not said so explicitly, yet he has
left it to be fairly inferred that such was his belief, both from
his use of the phrase you have singled out, and from his coup-
ling the sonnets with the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of
Lucrece, which he undoubtedly believed to have been Shake-
speare's two earliest poems. He was careful, however, not to
say in precise terms when the sonnets were written; and, in-
deed, it is impossible to do so authoritatively. With some
modification, I am disposed to adopt Mr. Payne Collier's view,
that 'the sonnets were written at very different periods of
Shakespeare's life, and under very different circumstances-
some in youth, some in more advanced age; some when he
was hopeful and happy, and some when he was desponding
and afflicted at his own condition in life and place in society.'
Among those which I think were undoubtedly written in his
comparative youth are the larger portion of the twenty-eight
which are printed last in all the collections, being those num-
bered from 127 to 154, and which were addressed to his mis-
tress. I am led to this conclusion, among other reasons, by
their manifest inferiority to the other sonnets, their evident
immaturity, and the almost total absence from them of those
marked Shakesperian expressions, phrases, turns of thought,
and courageous flights of fancy and imagination, which are
Shakespearian Passages in the Sonnets.
63
strewn so copiously over their companions. All, however, that
is positively known as to the date when the sonnets were writ-
ten is derived from a work by Shakespeare's friend, Francis
Meres, published in 1598, when the poet was thirty-four years
old, in which he says 'hony -tongued' Shakespeare's 'Venus
and Adonis, his Lucrece, and his sugred Sonnets,' had been
scattered among his private friends,' probably in manuscript.
But it was not until 1609, when Shakespeare was forty-five,
that they were published; and doubtless, in the interval, others
additional to those spoken of by Meres had been written, and
were included in that collection, which was substantially the
same as we now find among Shakespeare's works."
"You speak, Professor, of the Shakespearianisms which dis-
tinguish some of the sonnets above their fellows. Will you
particularize your meaning more fully?"
"I simply had in mind the frequent occurrence throughout
those sonnets, first, of words that are singularly apt, sparkling,
or expressive; seemingly so married together as to be indis-
soluble, and pregnant with obvious, or latent, or figurative
meaning; second, of phrases of rare musical sweetness and
striking peculiarity or originality, which sometimes embalm a
beautiful thought, and sometimes exhale a graceful or piquant
fancy-now transfixing some characteristic human trait, and
now photographing with delicious art some clear and distinct
single image, or some marvellously full but minutely condensed
picture and, third, of lines, whose flowing melodies bear upon
their rounded bosoms a rich freight of impassioned feeling,
opulent description, and profound wisdom. There is no part.
of Shakespeare's writings which exhibit a larger poetical in-
spiration than some of these brief passages, or which are more
indubitably his own, and not to be mistaken for the utterances
5
64
Afternoons with the Poets.
of another. Many of them are so perfect that any attempt to
amend them would fail ignominiously; and a misquotation of
them would be a dislocation and discord as palpable as would
be caused by a similar perversion of the finest passages in his
best-known plays."
"You know the homely old proverb, Professor, 'The proof
of the pudding is in the chewing of the bag.' Let us put the
divine Williams' to that test."
"And you also must know," he rejoined, "that to wrench a
jewel from its setting will detract materially from its radiance.
So is it likewise with words and phrases when torn from their
associations, and placed before us stripped of their allusions and
with all their significance darkened. Still, I have not spoken
idly, and shall not hesitate to apply your test to the sonnets.
What think you, for instance, of such collocations of words as
these: 'Beauteous niggard,' 'makes black night hideous,' 'sul-
lied Night,'' swart-complexioned Night,' 'black Night, Death's
second self,' 'Death's eternal cold,' 'Winter's ragged hand,'
devouring Time,'' swift-footed Time,' 'Time's injurious hand,'
'Time's tyranny,' 'the edge of doom,' 'eternal numbers,' 'a
quest of thoughts,' 'swift extremity,'' tender embassy of love,'
'divining eyes,' 'prophetic soul,' 'lean penury,'' old December's
bareness,' ' proud - pied April,' 'herald to the gaudy Spring,'
'the lovely April of her prime,' 'the Spring and foison of the
year,' 'tanned Antiquity,' 'captain jewel in the carcanet,' 'art,
made tongue-tied by authority,' 'devise some virtuous lie,' 'the
forward violet,' 'the deep vermilion in the rose,' etc., etc.
might multiply instances like these, every one of which, be-
sides being full of subtle suggestiveness, has the merit that Dr.
Johnson esteemed so highly of being 'thoroughly quotable;'
but I desist, that I may ask you to listen to some longer strains
=
Lines from the "Sugred Sonnets."
65
snatched from the same repertory of melody, wherein, as one
of these self-same sonnets tells us,
រ
“One string, sweet husband to another
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering.'
Hearken then to a few tones of the mighty master, pausing be-
tween each stolen sweet that you may take in its full meaning,
and enjoy its rich harmony. I say, hearken!
"Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head.'
"Never-resting Time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there.'
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.'
"The lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.'
"Summer's breath their masked buds discloses.'
"Yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'
"The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die.'
"The teeming Autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime.'
“The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair.'
"Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd.'
"That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan.'
66
Afternoons with the Poets.
"The true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married.'
"Men, as plants increase,
Cheered and check'd even by the self-same sky.'
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past.'
"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.'
"Love knows it is a greater grief
To bear Love's wrong, than Hate's known injury.'
"Slander's mark was ever yet the fair.'
"The coward conquest of a wretch's knife.'
"They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade.'
"Heaven in thy creation did devise
That on thy face sweet love should ever dwell.'
"Beauty's veil doth cover every blot.'
"On the finger of a throned queen
The basest jewel will be well esteem'd.'
"That love is merchandized, whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.'
"Time, whose million'd accidents
Creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings.'
"Truth needs no colour, with his colour fix'd;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth no lay;
But best is best, if never intermix'd.'”
"Truly enough, Professor, there can be no mistaking those
tones. They are Shakespeare's own, and no other's. While
you were repeating them, it seemed as if I were listening to
The Sonnets addressed to a Man.
67
some sweet familiar thoughts-familiar because of their family
resemblance to other well-remembered passages of Shakespeare."
"Yes, the likeness is obvious enough—so obvious, that if we
had the time, I might repeat parallel lines from the 'Plays'
which are counterparts of each of these, and bear so close a re-
semblance that the one seems, as you have just realized, the
echo of the other. But then it is an echo with a variation."
"I like them none the less because it may be said of them,
as Orsino says of remembered music, in 'Twelfth Night:'
"That strain again;-it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.'”
"You will be surprised to learn that, with the exception of
the concluding twenty-eight which I have assigned to Shake-
speare's early years, his Sonnets are a continuous poem address-
ed to a man; and that, on that account, they have been unin-
telligible to the majority of their readers. Hitherto, all the
poets who wrote sonnets had dedicated them to the celebration
of some woman whom they had worshipped with their love:
Dante's were inspired by Beatrice, Petrarch's by Laura, Sur-
rey's by the fair Geraldine, Sidney's by Stella, and Spenser's by
Elizabeth, his future wife. Consequently, many have taken up
Shakespeare's with the impression that his also were inspired by
the same grand passion; and at the outset they have been con-
firmed in this impression by the impassioned fervor of the lan-
guage of the sonnets, which has seemed to be so inconsistent
with the fact of their being addressed to a man as to be the
occasion of endless mystification. To what man they were
addressed has been the subject of much fruitless conjecture;
some critics declaring it was Shakespeare's munificent and ac-
68
Afternoons with the Poets.
complished friend, Southampton; and others, that it was the
equally accomplished but profligate Earl of Pembroke. But
neither have had any higher authority for their assumptions
than the enigmatical dedication of the first published edition
of the sonnets in 1609, by Thomas Thorpe, their publisher, to
'Mr. W. H.,' who, he informs us, was 'the onlie begetter of these
insuing Sonnets.' The advocates of the Earl of Southampton
base their claim on the supposition that 'W. H.' were the ini-
tials of his name, Henry Wriothesly, inverted; and the advo-
cates of Pembroke rest upon the equally unsubstantial founda-
tion that the initials stood for William Herbert, which was that
Earl's family name. The claims of each rest upon pure con-
jecture, and there is a large weight of evidence against both,
which might be stated if the 'game were worth the candle,'
but it is not. Coleridge was of the opinion that the use of the
masculine form in the sonnets was merely a veil. 'It seems
to me,' he says, 'that the sonnets could only have come from a
man deeply in love;' and he instances at least one of the son-
nets which he is persuaded was 'a purposed blind.' If Cole-
ridge's impression that Shakespeare's real object was a woman,
is correct—and there are many plausible reasons in its favor—
I quite agree with his accomplished American editor, Professor
Shedd, that there are many others of the sonnets besides the
twentieth, to which Coleridge probably alludes, which must also
be considered as blinds. If now, in addition to the antidote
against mystification and unintelligibility which this explana-
tion affords, you will make use of a Key devised by Mr. C. Armi-
tage Brown, author of 'Shakespeare's Autobiographical Poems,
you will be greatly assisted in understanding many things which
would otherwise seem dark. Mr. Payne Collier, with whom I
cordially concur, thinks this Key offers 'the best solution of
The Sonnets a Continuous Poem.
69
the various difficulties arising out of the sonnets yet published.'
The position of Mr. Brown is, that Shakespeare used the form
of the sonnet, as others had done before him, to construct a
continuous poem or succession of related poems; and he di-
vides 152 of the 154 sonnets into six distinct poems of this
sort. His arrangement of these six poems is as follows:
First Poem-Sonnets 1 to 26. To his friend, persuading
him to marry.
"Second Poem-Sonnets 27 to 55. To his friend, forgiv-
ing him for having robbed him of his mistress.
"Third Poem-Sonnets 56 to 77. To his friend, com-
plaining of his coldness, and warning him of life's decay.
"Fourth Poem-Sonnets 78 to 101. To his friend, com-
plaining that he prefers another poet's praises, and reproving
him for faults that may injure his character.
"Fifth Poem-Sonnets 102 to 126. To his friend, excus-
ing himself for having been some time inconstant, and disclaim-
ing the charge of inconstancy.
"Sixth Poem-Sonnets 127 to 152. To his mistress, on
her infidelity.""
(6
'Evening draws on silently but apace, Professor, and the
soft air and tranquil stillness invite music. Let us round off
the day with 'a concord of sweet sounds' of Shakespeare's
composing."
"I have so liberally quoted detached passages from his son-
nets that I supposed you would forego any further examples.
But
you shall have your wish. Here are nine, one for each of
the Muses, that I had marked for reading; the first two are in
praise of his mistress's eyes, the third is descriptive of the pen-
siveness of memory, the fourth is a picture of a variable day,
the fifth and sixth relate to love and flowers, the seventh is on
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Afternoons with the Poets.
the unchangeableness of love, and the last two are prophecies
of the perpetuity of his own verse:
"Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,
Have put on black, and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face:
O, let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me, since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part;
Then will I swear beauty herself is black,
And all they foul that thy complexion lack.
"O! call not me to justify the wrong
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart;
Wound me not with thine eye, but with thy tongue;
Use power with power, and slay me not by art.
Tell me thou lov'st elsewhere; but in my sight,
Dear heart, forbear to glance thine eye aside.
What need'st thou wound with cunning when thy might
Is more than my o'erpressed defence can bide?
Let me excuse thee: ah! my love well knows
Her pretty looks have been mine enemies,
And therefore from my face she turns my foes,
That they elsewhere might dart their injuries:
Yet do not so; but since I am near slain,
Kill me outright with looks, and rid my pain.
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
Some of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times' waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long-since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.
"Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.
"O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:
71
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Afternoons with the Poets.
*
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall fade, my* verse distils your truth.
"The forward violet thus did I chide:-
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells,
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dy'd.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both,
And to this robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee.
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove :
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it even to the edge of doom.
* In old editions, "by;" changed by Malone to “my.”
Some of Shakespeare's Sonnets.
If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
“'Or I shall live your epitaph to make,
Or you survive when I in earth am rotten;
From hence your memory death cannot take,
Although in me each part will be forgotten.
Your name from hence immortal life shall have,
Though I, once gone, to all the world must die:
The earth can yield me but a common grave,
When you entombed in men's eyes shall lie.
Your monument shall be my gentle verse,
Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read;
And tongues to be, your being shall rehearse,
When all the breathers of this world are dead;
You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen),
Where breath most breathes,—even in the mouths of men.
"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,
And the sad augers mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.""
73
[
I
*:
←
Third Afternoon.
III.
"WHAT a marvellous age for mighty men was that of Eliza-
beth!" began the Professor, when we again met under our fa-
vorite oak. "Though it may be said of it, as of every age,
'there were heroes before Agamemnon,' yet in no other period
of English history was the stage crowded with so many stately
figures: with men who made so powerful an impression upon
the world of their own day, or whose influence has been so
profound and lasting on after ages. In government and diplo-
macy, in discovery and adventure, in arms by sea and land, in
law and philosophy, in poetry and the drama, they assumed a
supremacy that has remained unimpeached and unapproached.
Their vigor, their versatility, their indomitable activity, and
their fertility and originality of resources were amazing. What
a magnificent muster-roll is that on which are inscribed the
names of the Cecils, the Sidneys, and the Dudleys; of the
Arundels, the Carys, the Howards, and the Talbots; of Coke
and Bacon; of Walsingham, Paget, Buckhurst, and Throg-
morton; of Grey, Norris, Herbert, Essex, and Raleigh; of
Grenville, Winter, Paulet, Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake, and the
Gilberts; of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford and Massinger, Mar-
lowe, Ben Jonson, Spenser, and Shakespeare! Most justly has
the reign of Elizabeth come to be distinguished as an era spe-
cially remarkable for intellectual power, and for literary, politi-
cal, and military greatness. The 'Elizabethan age,' the 'Eliza-
78
Afternoons with the Poets.
bethan era,' stands the sole one among the reigns of English
monarchs which has been thus singled out, or which has de-
served the extraordinary honor. It was an age when magnifi-
cent enterprises were the offspring of a union of ambition with
imagination, and when daring deeds were prompted by ad-
venture grafted on patriotism, and were made fascinating by
the even-glow of romance and chivalry that lingered round the
reign of the Virgin Queen. Its men were grand actors on a
grand theatre: even their pastimes were gorgeous pageants,
and their trifles of speech and action bore the stamp of gran-
deur; their vices were not mean or ignoble, and their virtues
were splendid. The atmosphere of their daily life was resplen-
dent with many-colored beams of brightness, and it was sur-
charged with a robust and rich vitality. Yes, my friend, it was
an age when great thoughts were waited upon by great deeds;
when courage and earnestness were married to ceaseless en-
deavor and inexhaustible vigor; and when conscious power
wielded the sword of the soldier and sailor, and inspired the
pen of the statesman, the philosopher, and the poet."
"The caracolings of your hobby are very pleasant to behold,
Professor," I interrupted, "and you ride him featly; but the
interest in the sonnet excited by our former conversations
prompts me to invite you to dismount and resume the subject
at the point where we left off. I presume the example and
success of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare in cultivating the
Italian exotic, and especially the commanding authority of
Shakespeare, secured for it a settled place in English poetry,
and that thereafter it became firmly rooted in our literature?"
"You seem to be unaware," he replied, "that although the
'authority of Shakespeare,' of which you speak, was partially
recognized in his later years, it was not undisputed, and was far
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries.
79
from being as weighty as it has since become. He, himself
the least arrogant of men, never assumed a superiority over
his brother poets, though in his sonnets he exhibits a calm
consciousness of his own strength, and repeatedly predicts the
perpetuity of his verse; and it is certain that his supremacy
was hotly contested by other contemporaneous poets, who
shared with him quite equally the suffrages of the lovers and
patrons of literature. Shakespeare's modest appraisal of his
own productions, evinced by his unconcern for their fate ex-
cept as they were or were not attractive as acted plays, seems
to have encouraged such of his contemporaries as considered
him their rival to rate him at his own valuation, while they
actively asserted their own superiority. Why, incredible as it
may now seem, the favor of the wits and writers of that day
was divided for a considerable time between him and Robert
Greene-the Boucicault of his day, clever and industrious as a
play-wright, but of small merit as a poet; and they even claimed
for him a higher rank than Shakespeare as a poet and drama-
tist, while Greene himself appears to have honestly believed in
the assumption, though his irritating jealousy of Shakespeare
ought to have made him doubt the justice of the award. At
all events, assisted by his friend and sympathizer, Tom Nash,
another envious dramatist and critic, he asserted his own su-
periority by decrying Shakespeare. Others claimed the su-
periority for Marlowe, who was undoubtedly a man of irregular
but vigorous and grandly imaginative genius; others for Chap-
man, now best known by a translation of Homer, which has
been held by many distinguished modern poets the most poet-
ical and original of the versions that have been made; and
others still challenged the supremacy for Daniel, who was in-
deed an unusually correct and agreeable poet. Time, however,
.
6
80
Afternoons with the Poets.
has revoked all these judgments, quieted the clamor of all
these belligerents, and vindicated Shakespeare's immeasurable
superiority over all his rivals. Their names and works are al-
most forgotten, while his writings are read, and his name has
become a familiar household word wherever the English tongue
is spoken or English literature loved and understood. Ben
Jonson was right when he called Shakespeare the 'soul of the
age;' but he was more than right, he was prophetic, when he
declared that
"He was not of an age, but for all time.'”
"Professor," I interjected, "did you ever read that inimita-
ble jumble of wit and wisdom, play and earnest, sense and non-
sense, choice rarities and loose odds and ends, 'The Doctor?"
"No," he replied, thrown a little out of his habitual sweet-
ness by the abruptness and apparent irrelevancy of my ques-
tion; "but why do you ask?"
"Because you remind me of Southey's proneness to wander
off into digressions which are tantalizing even when they are
the most interesting. I think you must regard them much as
he did as 'the waste weirs of a canal; interludes; sympho-
nies between the acts; voluntaries during the service; resting-
places on the ascent of a church tower; angular recesses of an
old bridge into which passengers may retire; seats by the way-
side; hospices on the passage of the Alps; Capes of Good
Hope, yea, Islands of Tinian, or Juan Fernandez upon the long
voyage whereon we are bound.” ”
66
'It is true I had not given form to my idea of the office of
digressions, as Southey has so gracefully and happily done," he
replied; “but I fully endorse his summary of their uses and
convenience. Of course I should not advise a resort to them
Uses of Digressions.
81
in any orderly written composition, where, even when the most
entertaining, they must often seem impertinent or tiresome.
But in conversation it is different; for true conversation shrinks
from the narrow and formal limits prescribed to the essay, and
delights in and is made more engaging by freedom of action.
Digressions in conversation are like changing strains and vary-
ing melodies in music; they are the means by which an idea
suggested but not explicitly uttered by one speaker takes form
in the mind of another, and finds a voice and expression, thus
contributing to fulness and variety. All true dialogue is built
on digression; but it must be digression without divergence.
Yes, my lad, digression has its uses it is the very life of con-
versation, the atmosphere in which the suggested but unspoken
spark of thought takes fire and helps to kindle the torch of
knowledge into a brighter flame."
Bravo! Professor," I exclaimed, "you have wormed out of
that scrape capitally. But now, lest you should spin out our
talks about the sonnet as interminably as Southey did the 'Doc-
tor,' and, like him, weary a fellow of even a good thing, I de-
mand the previous question: Did the example of Sidney, Spen-
ser, and Shakespeare secure a settled place for the sonnet in
English poetry, and cause it thereafter to become firmly rooted
in our literature ?”
Yes, the example of these great men settled the matter for
the sonnet in England; especially the example of that one
of them who is the 'poets' poet.' From this time forward the
sonnet ceased to be a hot-house exotic, and, naturalized to the
soil, grew in the open English air till it became a hardy and
vigorous plant. Yet it was not widely cultivated by many
among Shakespeare's most eminent contemporaries and imme-
diate successors, for the same reason, doubtless, that every other
82
Afternoons with the Poets.
form of poetry, save the drama, was comparatively neglected
by them. It must be remembered that the age of Shakespeare,
and the years which most closely preceded and followed it, were
the era of the rise of the true drama in England; and for a
long time the popularity of and demand for acted plays by the
Court, the nobility, and the people—and I may add, their su-
perior profitableness-together with the competition for their
production, taxed to the utmost the attention and the powers
of the great poets of the time. Ben Jonson, after sneering at
the sonnet in some of his dramas, gave in a tardy adhesion to
them, and wrote a few which are not of a kind to add to his
reputation as a poet. Beaumont and Fletcher literally wrote
none, if we except two wretched specimens by the former-one
to 'Calliope' and the other in overstrained praise of Ben Jon-
son's 'Silent Woman.' Marlowe, and Ford, and Massinger were
dumb. Chapman resorted to them mainly in his dedications
as a vehicle for lavishing panegyrics upon his titled patrons, or
those others whom, after the fashion of the day, he sought to
propitiate as such. And so with all the prominent dramatists.
The sonnet was abandoned to poets of inferior rank, who fortu-
nately were men of fine taste and active fancy, and the masters
of a tolerably pure style. These appreciated its merits, and
under their hands it was reared into divers forms of beauty..
Among these meritorious lesser poets, to whom we are largely
indebted for the continued development and perfection of the
sonnet, were Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Drummond of
Hawthornden, Sir John Davies, John Donne, George Wither,
William Habington, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, and oth-
ers; who, following the initiative of Shakespeare, still further
liberated it from its aforetime exclusively amatory shackles
and gave it a fuller liberty.
Characteristics of Perfect Sonnet.
83
"While many of the sonnets of these early poets," continued
the Professor," especially those of Daniel, Drummond, Habing-
ton, and Herbert, are of decided merit, yet, speaking generally,
they were extremely unequal. Some are nearly perfect in their
exterior structure, but are barren of those internal graces and
meanings which mark the genuine sonnet; others have an af-
fluence of interior meaning, but it is wedded to lame or unmu-
sical rhymes and a defective arrangement, or it is marred by a
lack of coherent unity. For the perfect sonnet is faultless in
its exterior form, and its interior spirit is as pervading and sub-
tle in its delicious diffusiveness as is the odor of the hawthorn
or the violet: as to form, it has the requisite number of rhyth-
mical lines of due length, and also of recurring rhymes of true
musical concord and fulness; as to spirit, it embodies a single
dominant poetical thought, whose hues are made to vary with
the changes wrought upon it by subordinate related thoughts,
which in their turn converge upon and heighten the effect of
the leading idea, just as the several facets of the diamond
shine with a lustre of their own but add to the brilliance of the
central gem. To pursue the figure which provoked your mirth
in our first conversation, as the diamond is clear and transpar-
ent to the eye, so must the sonnet be to the understanding. It
is a grave error to suppose that its meaning must be dark or
enigmatical; on the contrary, it is adulterate in proportion as
it is unintelligible. A sonnet may convey the most sententious
wisdom and the plainest truths, but if, like an ingenious puzzle,
these elude pursuit or baffle discovery, or if they are prosaic
and unideal, they detract from its value. The meaning of the
true sonnet, like that of all genuine poetry, needs not to be
groped for darkly, or to be reached after by reason and argu-
ment; but its message, like that of the flower, the bird, or
+
84
Afternoons with the Poets.
the sunset, is obvious and direct, and when it is so, its recog-
nition will be as prompt and spontaneous as is that of beauty
every where."
(i
Professor, when you say Jonson's sonnets are not such as
to add to his reputation as a poet, am I to understand that
you consider them defective in correctness of style and poetic
merit? His character for accurate scholarship and poetical
genius has led me to suppose that in these particulars he was
superior to criticism."
"And yet those are precisely the particulars in which his
less than half a score of sonnets are most defective. Aside
from the fact that they are nearly all in a fulsome compliment-
ary or a patronizing commendatory strain, they are mere hy-
brids-neither epigrams nor sonnets, while pretending to be
both and greatly below mediocrity. If there are any sonnets
in our language, by poets of repute, which are more devoid of
merit than all of his save two, I have not been able to find
them. But then the defects in Jonson's sonnets, though more
numerous and obvious than those in his other writings, are
only such as are common to nearly all his productions, if we
except the inimitable songs which are lavishly scattered over
his plays and masques, and some of the short poems in his
'Underwoods.' Undoubtedly Jonson (1573-1637) was a great
and scholarly poet; and when he addressed himself to a task
con amore, he was correct without stiffness, learned without ped-
antry, exact without servility, and ornate without being affected
or euphuistic. He had, however, an overweening opinion of
himself, bordering upon vanity, and not a little tinctured with
jealousy; and his pretensions were so cockered and humored
by his friends and admirers among contemporaneous poets and
men of genius that he became puffed up with the presumption
Ben Jonson's Plays.
85
that whatsoever flowed from his pen had the indelible stamp of
genius, when in reality much of it was mere chaff and stubble.
His plays, on which his fame chiefly rests, have many sterling
merits their plots are generally carefully elaborated, consist-
ent in their details, and dramatic in their movement; their
scenic effects are natural but striking; they are enlivened by
frequent sallies of wit or flashes of genius; are enriched with
numerous passages remarkable for their brilliance, their beauty,
their acute and sententious wisdom, their bitter but wholesome
satire, and their pungent criticism; and, within a comparatively
narrow range, they faithfully reflect the fugitive peculiarities,
or, as he himself would say, 'the humours' of the times. To
their great praise it can also be said that they were free from
the unutterable uncleanness that besmirched the writings of
nearly all his contemporaries. But these great excellences
were offset by great defects: his choicest gems are too of
ten buried beneath a mass of trivial or worthless rubbish, his
finest thoughts sunk in an ocean of empty babblement, and his
stage is encumbered by a crowd of characters who contribute
nothing to, indeed interrupt, the action, and exert no sensible
influence upon the denouement-scarcely any of his masculine
characters impose upon us as real living and breathing men,
and his women are limp, faded, and insipid. Jonson's inequal-
ity in these respects is in strong contrast with Shakespeare's
unebbing fulness and level amplitude; and to it and his garru-
lity it is owing that his dramas are now nearly banished from
the stage, and are not even popular in the closet. Nevertheless,
he was justly called by Sir John Beaumont (an elder brother
of the dramatist) the 'great refiner of our poesy,' and his plays
fully justify the applause bestowed upon them by his friend
Sir Thomas Hawkins-
R
i
86
Afternoons with the Poets.
'Folly, and brain sick humours of the time,
Distemper'd passion and audacious crime,
Thy pen so on the stage doth personate,
That ere men scarce begin to know they hate
The vice presented, and there lessons learn,
Virtue, from vicious habits to discern.
Oft have I seen thee in a sprightly strain
To lash a vice, and yet no one complain;
Thou threw'st the ink of malice from thy pen,
Whose aim was evil manners, not ill men.
"Professor, your low estimate of Jonson's sonnets only whets
my curiosity. I would fain decide for myself as to its justice,
and of course you will not deny me the opportunity."
"Certainly not," he replied, "the more especially since no.
gallery of sonnets would be even tolerably complete in which
there was no specimen of 'Rare Ben's' handiwork, even though
the sample were far below the standard of his best powers. I
ought to say, however, that if we observed the strict order of
time, we should defer our inspection of his sonnets until after
we had examined those of some other writers of that period
who were certainly elder if not better poets than he. But his
acknowledged rank will be a sufficient excuse for giving him the
precedence. You may remember that I spoke in general terms
of his sonnets as being less than half a score in number. In
reality there are but seven; and of these, two were addressed
in a vein of fulsome panegyric, the first to King Charles and
Queen Mary on the death of their first-born in 1629; and the
other, in the following year, to Queen Mary on the occasion of
her lying-in a second time. The one last-named opens with
an extravagant appropriation to Queen Mary of the salutation.
by the Angel to the Virgin Mary, ‘Hail, Mary, full of grace!'
Two others are kindly but prosaic and patronizing compli-
Jonson's Sonnets.
87
ments to brother poets on the appearance of their productions;
and another is a fretful and rather petty complaint against the
King's Household, prompted by what the poet considered a too
niggardly allowance of sack for his use. The remaining son-
nets are in a loftier strain, and are genial and cordial tributes,
respectively, to the Lady Mary Wroth, Sir Philip Sidney's niece,
and to the youthful sons of his deceased friend, the accomplish-
ed Sir Kenelm Digby. These two are all of Jonson's sonnets
that deserve to be repeated; and in quoting them I give the
precedence to the one to the lady. It is to be found in Jon-
son's Underwoods :'
"I that have been a lover, and could shew it,
Though not in these, in rhymes not wholly dumb,
Since I exscribe your sonnets, am become
A better lover, and much better poet.
Nor is my Muse or I asham'd to owe it
To those true numerous graces, whereof some
But charm the senses, others overcome
Both brains and hearts; and mine now best do know it:
For in your verse all Cupid's armory,
His flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his bow,
His very eyes are yours to overthrow.
But then his mother's sweets you so apply,
Her joys, her smiles, her loves, as readers take
For Venus' ceston every line you make.'
The other sonnet is one of a series of poems under the gen-
eral title, 'Eupheme; or the Fair Fame left to Posterity of
that Truly Noble Lady, the Lady Venetia Digby, late Wife of
Sir Kenelm Digby, Knight, a Gentleman Absolute in all Num-
bers,' and is addressed to the three sons of the knight, Kenelm,
John, and George. A special interest attaches to this sonnet,
because it is ushered in by the following prefatory epistle,
88
Afternoons with the Poets.
which was signed by Jonson: 'But for you, growing gentle-
men, the happy branches of two so illustrious houses [Nor-
thumberland and Stanley] as these, wherefrom your honoured
mother is in both lines descended; let me leave you this last
legacy of counsel; which, so soon as you arrive at years of ma-
ture understanding, open you, sir, that are the eldest, and read
it to your brethren, for it will concern you all alike. Vowed
by a faithful servant and client of your family, with his latest
breath expiring it.' Then follows the sonnet:
"Boast not these titles of your ancestors,
Brave youths, they're their possessions, none of yours:
When your own virtues equall'd have their names,
'Twill be but fair to lean upon their fames;
For they are strong supporters: but, till then,
The greatest are but growing gentlemen.
It is a wretched thing to trust to reeds;
Which all men do, that urge not their own deeds
Up to their ancestors; the river's side
By which you're planted shows your fruit shall bide.
Hang all your rooms with one large pedigree:
'Tis virtue alone is true nobility:
Which virtue from your father, ripe, will fall;
Study illustrious him, and you have all.""
"I am glad, Professor, that you have recited these sonnets;
for to my thinking there is much of graceful fancy mixed with
the high-flown compliment of the first, and the other has an
elevation of thought and a grave dignity and sweetness that are
not altogether unworthy of the fame of 'great, learned, witty
Ben.' With what a glow of reverential pride those 'growing
gentlemen,' the three young Digbys, must have read the praises
of their father from the pen of such a man as Jonson! There
is something very touching in his manly and affectionate ap-
Sir Walter Raleigh.
89
peal to them not to rest upon nor yet wholly to despise the re-
nown of their grand and titled ancestors, but to esteem it an
honorable legacy which should stimulate them to win honor by
their own endeavors, taking their dead father for their exem-
plar, and like him exemplifying the truth that the practice of
virtue is the highest nobility. It was noble counsel, nobly and
tenderly given. But I am usurping your prerogative, and for-
get that it is my privilege to hear and yours to talk. Craving
your pardon for my presumption, I will detain you no longer
from those 'elder, if not better,' poets whom you postponed to
Jonson."
"If we were to pass all these in review," said the Professor,
"it would be a long and uninteresting story to you; since.
some of them, and they the least worthy to be called poets,
were infinite begetters of sonnets, sometimes reaching as high
as two hundred at an incubation. I shall therefore confine my-
self to several of the most notable among them for social rank
or poetic merit. And first in the order of time comes Sir
Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), the renowned courtier, soldier,
sailor, discoverer, statesman, poet, historian, and friend of Spen-
ser, Sidney, and Shakespeare; by the first named of whom, he
was chosen from among all the worthies of Elizabeth's brilliant
court to be 'eternized' in a letter prefixed to and always
published with the 'Faerie Queene,' 'expounding' the author's
'whole intention' therein, and addressed 'To the Right Noble
and Valorous Sir Walter Raleigh, Knight.' This astonishing
man,' as the genial George Ellis justly denominates Raleigh,
combined the most opposite and most dazzling talents and ac-
complishments. A man of restless activity, whose capacious
mind teemed with grand schemes that penetrated to every part
of the globe, he was also a recluse thinker, a diligent and con-
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Afternoons with the Poets.
templative student, a ready and brilliant wit, a graceful poet,
and a vigorous and elegant prose writer. His prose, indeed, is
far in advance of his time-ornate, majestic, musically flowing,
and often gilded with the 'heavenly alchemy' of true poesy.
Even his most recondite works are phosphorescent with the
rich fancies and excursive imaginings that are strewn over
them in negligent profusion; and his few poems are affluent
of grace and tenderness. With these, however, we can have
naught to do, but must confine ourselves to his sonnets. These
are only two in number, and are in praise of Spenser's 'Faerie
Queene,' in connection with which they are always printed;
and they are remarkable for the splendid extravagance of their
estimate of the merits of that wonderful 'darke allegory.' The
first that I shall cite is entitled, 'A Vision upon this Conceipt
of the Faery Queene:'
"Me thought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that Temple where the vestall flame
Was wont to burne; and passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb faire Love and fairer Virtue kept;
All suddeinly I saw the Faery Queene:
At whose approach the soule of Petrarke wept,
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seene;
(For they this Queene attended;) in whose steed
Oblivion laid him down on Lauras hearse:
Hereat the hardest stones were seene to bleed,
And grones of buried ghostes the hevens did perse:
Where Homers spright did tremble all for griefe,
And curst th' acesse of that celestiall Theife.'
The other sonnet, if indeed it may be properly called a son-
net, is entitled ‘Another of the Same,' and contains some very
beautiful lines; but it is chiefly noteworthy for its high ap-
George Chapman.
91
praisal of Spenser's poetry. Its irregularities are so many and
great that I quote it with some hesitation :
"The prayse of meaner wits this Worke like profit brings,
As doth the Cuckoes song delight when Philumena sings.
If thou hast formed right true Vertues face herein,
Vertue herselfe can best discerne to whom they written bin.
If thou hast Beauty praysd, let Her sole lookes divine
Judge if ought therein be amis, and mend it by Her eine.
If Chastitie want ought, or Temperaunce her dew,
Behold Her Princely mind aright, and write thy Queene anew.
Meane while She shall perceive, how far Her vertues sore
Above the reach of all that live, or such as wrote of yore:
And thereby will excuse and favour thy good will;
Whose vertue can not be exprest but by an Angels quill.
Of me no lines are lov'd, nor letters are of price,
(Of all which speak our English tongue,) but those of thy device.'"
"George Chapman (1557-1634), to whom I have before al-
luded as the translator of Homer, was five years the junior of
Raleigh; but he was never the possessor of the elastic hopeful-
ness or the youthful buoyancy of spirits which animated that
great man even when bowed beneath the weight of years and
unmerited misfortune. Chapman was never young: from the
first grave, sedate, studious, austere in morals and pure in con-
duct, as years gathered he brooded over the passionate and
grand thoughts that stirred his soul till he became morbidly in-
trospective and proudly self-sufficient. His writings were col-
ored by his temperament: his poems and dramas are rich in
passages of superabounding strength and sweetness, fully justi-
fying the opinion of his latest and ablest critic, that 'there are
few poets from whose remains a more copious and noble an-
thology of detached beauties might be selected.' But these
beauties are overladen by a profusion of paradox and digres-
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Afternoons with the Poets.
sion, are provokingly blended with overstrained illustrations
and conceits, and are obscured by an involved tangle of pedan-
tic metaphysical speculation, bombastic declamation, and swell-
ing hyperbole. Like Jonson, he was strikingly unequal; but,
lacking Jonson's genius, he never reached his altitudes, while
he was saved by his more rigid and intractable though infinite-
ly less refined taste from descending quite to that great writer's
lowest depths. In his able but phenomenally discursive Essay
on Chapman's Poetical and Dramatic Works,' Mr. Swinburne
has a racy and vigorous criticism of Chapman's style, which I
adopt as embodying my own estimate, with the reservation that
it is perhaps too ingeniously elaborate in its collocation of epi-
thets, and that it applies, as Mr. Swinburne probably intend-
ed, with less precision to Chapman's dramas than to his other
productions. Says Mr. Swinburne: The dialect of Chapman's
poems is undoubtedly portentous in its general barbarism; and
that study of purer writers, which might in another case have
been trusted to correct and chasten the turgid and fiery vigor
of a barbarous imagination, seems too often to have incrusted
the mind with such arrogance and the style with such pedan-
try as to make certain of these poems, full of earnest thought,
of passionate energy, of tumid and fitful eloquence, the most in-
digestible food ever served up to the guests of a man of genius
by the master of the feast. Under no circumstances, proba-
bly, would Chapman have been always a pure and harmonious
writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form the dark
hard masses of his deep and ardent thought, of uttering the
weighty and noble things he had to say in a fluent and lucid
style; but as it was, he appears from first to last to have erected
his natural defects into an artificial system, and cultivated his
incapacities as other men cultivate their faculties. *** It
Chapman's Sonnets.
93
should seem to be with malice aforethought that he sets him-
self to bring to perfection the qualities of crabbed turgidity
and barbarous bombast with which nature had but too richly
endowed him, mingling these among many better gifts with
so cunning a hand and so malignant a liberality as well-nigh
to stifle the good seed of which yet she had not been sparing.'
Despite all these drawbacks, however, the great qualities of
Chapman's genius cannot be denied, and Mr. Swinburne felici-
tously remarks of it that throughout its grave and frequent
blemishes 'bear manifestly more likeness to the deformities of
a giant than to the malformations of a dwarf, to the over-
strained muscles of an athlete than to the withered limbs of a
weakling.' And now, having brought you sufficiently acquaint-
ed with this far too little known poet, let us turn to his son-
nets. These, when all told, are thirty-five in number, of which
twenty-five are in the highest key of panegyric, ten are in hon-
or of philosophy, and one is in compliment of the author of
'Nennio,' a forgotten treatise on nobility. The sonnet to Nen-
nio is neither fish nor flesh, prose or poetry, and is insipid al-
most to stupidity. Two of the panegyrical sonnets are ad-
dressed respectively to Prince Henry and his mother, Qucen
Anne: neither have much poetical merit, and are remarkable
for nothing save a clumsy anagram in the first-named on the
title of the Prince of Wales, and for the evident complacency
with which the author seems to have regarded this exhibition
of his puerility. The remaining panegyrical sonnets, twenty-
two in number, were printed by Chapman at the end of his
translation of Homer, and were addressed to the chief nobility :
for example, 'To the Right Gracious and Worthy the Duke of
Lennox ;' 'To the Most Grave and Honoured Temperer of Law
and Equity, the Lord Chancellor' (Lord Bacon); 'To the Most
94
Afternoons with the Poets.
Renowned and Worthy Earl, Lord Treasurer and Treasure of
our Country, the Earl of Salisbury' (Burleigh); ‘To the Most
Honoured Restorer of Ancient Nobility, both in Blood and
Virtue, the Earl of Suffolk;' 'To the Right Gracious Illustrator
of Virtue, and Worthy of the Favour Royal, the Earl of Mont-
gomery;' 'To the Most Learned and Noble Concluder of the
War's Art and the Muses', the Lord L'Isle;' 'To the Happy
Star Discovered in our Sydneian Asterism, Comfort of Learn-
ing, Sphere of all the Virtues, the Lady Wrothe;' and so on to
the end of the chapter.
"In addition to the dedicatory prefixes, of which the above.
are samples, a number of this class of sonnets have introducto-
ry notes immediately following the ascription, which are con-
structed on the most approved euphuistic models, and are very
curious in themselves, and as an illustration of the extravagant
homage which men of letters in that day felt obliged to pay to
rank and station in order to secure a recognition of their claim
to genius, and celebrity for their productions. Thus the prefa-
tory note to the Duke of Lennox sues in this fashion: 'Divine
Homer humbly submits that desert of acceptation in his pre-
sentment, which all worthiest Dukes have acknowledged worth
honour and admiration;' the one to Lord Bacon is in a rather
loftier and less adulatory strain: 'The first Prescriber of both
Law and Equity, Authentic Homer, humbly presents his Eng-
lish Revival, and beseecheth noble Countenance to the Sacred
Virtues he eternizeth;' that to Burleigh is briefer but more
tumid: 'The First Treasurer of human wisdom, divine Homer
beseecheth grace and welcome to his English Arrival;' in the
one to the Earl of Northampton, Homer comes in the guise of
a suppliant: 'Old Homer, the first parent of learning and an-
tiquity, presents this part of his eternal issue, and humbly de-
*
Chapman's Dedications.
95
sires (for help to their entire propagation) his (the Earl's)
cheerful and judicial acceptance;' in the one to the Earl of
Pembroke the old Greek's imaginary appeal through his Brit-
ish substitute has less of the whine of a sturdy beggar:
'Against the two Enemies of Humanity and Religion (Igno-
rance and Impiety) the awaked spirit of the most knowing and
divine Homer calls, to attendance of our Heroical Prince, the
most honoured and uncorrupted Hero, the Earl of Pembroke;'
and the one to the unfortunate Lady Arabella Stuart affords a
pretty climax to this pedantic fooling: 'To our English Athe-
nia, chaste Arbitress of Virtue and Learning, the Lady Ara-
bella, revived Homer submits cause of Renewing her former
conference with his Original Spirit, and prays her judicial grace
to his English conversion.'
"It is only just to Chapman to say that the sonnets them-
selves are far less abject than these adjuncts. It is true they
are all couched in terms that would be offensive to the more
correct taste of these later days, but they are not more extrava-
gant in this respect than his sonnets addressed to an impersonal
abstraction to his 'Mistress Knowledge,' for instance; and
probably do not greatly transcend the limit of old-fashioned,
high-flown, and ceremonious compliment. Certainly, there is
nothing like truckling servility in them; but as the able critic
suggests, whom I have already quoted so liberally and with
whom I have so generally agreed, they are characterized
throughout by 'the high self-respect of a poet who never for-
gets that, for every benefit of patronage conferred, he gives
fully as much as he may receive.' Equally true is his obser-
vation that 'men usually hurry over the dedications of poet to
patron with a keen angry sense of shame and sorrow, of pity
and repulsion and regret; but it may be justly claimed for
7
96
Afternoons with the Poets.
Chapman that his verses of dedication can give no reader such
pain as those of others.' In these dedicatory sonnets he am-
plifies the thought with frank freedom, that the translation of
Homer which he presents to the favor of the chief nobility will
furnish them, each in his particular sphere of rank or duty, the
best exemplar and most perfect model, and that it is the am-
plest treasury of wise and sage experience. In the midst of
his most resounding panegyric he pauses to declare that men
of the most exalted rank will honor themselves rather than con-
fer honor upon the poet or translator by the familiar study of
his works. Thus, in one of these sonnets, after inviting a noble
of illustrious name and rank to look on the 'heroes of the
world's prime years' as depicted by Homer, he bids him--
"Inform your princely mind and spirit by them,
And then, like them, live ever.'
In another he reminds the greatest intellect of that, and per-
haps of any age, that poetry is not so far removed from the
‘grave administry' of the public weal as is popularly believed;
and referring him to Homer for lessons of practical wisdom in
affairs, he exclaims:
"Hear this Poet sing,
Most judging Lord, and see how he reveals
The mysteries of rule, and rules to guide
The life of man through all his choicest ways.'
In another he strives to incite a noble of renowned and ancient
lineage to join in doing honor to Homer by directing his at-
tention to the immortalizing qualities of poetry. And in still
another, which shall be the last of this class to which I shall
advert, he gives the following eloquent epitome of the power
of poetry to refine and ennoble mankind:
A
Chapman's Homer.
"She all things worthy favour doth maintain.
Virtue in all things else at best, she betters,
Honour she heightens, and gives life in death.
She is the ornament and soul of letters,
The world's deceit before her vanisheth.
Simple she is as doves, like serpents wise,
Sharp, grave, and sacred; nought but things divine,
And things divining, fit her faculties,
Accepting her as she is genuine.
If she be vain, then all things else are vile.'
97
"The translation of Homer to which these sonnets were pre-
fixed made a powerful and permanent impression upon some of
our later poets, including among others Habington, Waller, Cow-
per, Keats, and Coleridge; and it inspired several of them to pro-
duce sonnets which are notable for their strength and elegance,
and the loftiness of their tone. Coleridge's estimate of this great
work may be taken as a fair expression of the judgment of the
others. In his opinion, with the exception of those passages in
which Chapman attempts to render certain of Homer's phrases
literally into English compound-epithets, 'it has no look, no
air of a translation,' and 'is as truly an original poem as the
Faerie Queene.' 'Chapman,' he says, 'writes and feels as a
poet—as Homer might have written had he lived in England
in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. * * * It is an exquisite poem
in spite of its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harsh-
nesses, which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled
sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and feeling.
In the main it is an exquisite English heroic poem, the tale of
which is borrowed from the Greek.'-There are ten of Chap-
man's sonnets that remain to be noticed. These are strung
together in an imaginary coronal, entitled 'A Coronet for his
Mistress Philosophy;' and they have all the striking peculiari-
T
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Afternoons with the Poets.
ties of his other poetical compositions, though in a subdued
form-his style being held under somewhat better control, its
extravagance abated, and its pedantry made less obtrusive.
While each of these sonnets is independent, yet, to enable the
author to carry out his pet simile of a coronet, they are con-
nected by a slight thread of related thought, and the connec-
tion is made more palpable by the device of converting the
concluding line of each into a refrain which forms the opening
line of the one next succeeding, the entire series being rounded
off by the repetition of the first line of the opening sonnet as
the last line of the concluding one. This species of conceit
was a favorite exercise of their ingenuity with many writers of
that period, and indeed of much later times; but of course has
nothing to commend it on the score of poetical merit or util-
ity. Along with the miserable flock of trivialities—anagrams,
acrostics, rebuses, rondeaus, and the like—which have been so
much affected by men of letters, it is a mere verbal trick, whose
ingenuity is its chief and very doubtful recommendation.-But
I have beat around the bush long enough; the specimens of
Chapman's sonnets that I now offer are selected from his 'Cor-
onet,' because they, more fully than those of the other class,
represent his capabilities in this line of his art; and to afford
some idea of his technical method in the treatment of his son-
nets in this series, I give two in their consecutive order:
"Muses that sing Love's sensual empery,
And lovers kindling your enraged fires
At Cupid's bonfires burning in the eye,
Blown with the empty breath of vain desires,
You that prefer the painted cabinet
Before the wealthy jewels it doth store ye,
That all your joys in dying figures set,
And stain the living substance of your glory,
Sonnets from Chapman's "Coronet."
Abjure those joys, abhor their memory,
And let my love the honoured subject be
Of love, and honour's complete history;
Your eyes were never yet let in to see
The majesty and riches of the mind,
But dwell in darkness; for your God is blind.
"But dwell in darkness, for your God is blind,
7
Humour pours down such torrents on his eyes;
Which, as from mountains, fall on his base kind,
And eat your entrails out with ecstacies.
Colour, whose hands for faintness are not felt,
Can bind your waxen thoughts in adamant;
And with her painted fires your heart doth melt,
Which beat your souls in pieces with a pant.
But my love is the cordial of souls,
Teaching by passion what perfection is,
In whose fix'd beauties shine the sacred scrolls,
And long-lost records of your human bliss,
Spirit to flesh, and soul to spirit giving,
Love flows not from my liver but her living."
99
Here the Professor made a long pause, and seemed lost in
thought, till at length, auguring from his continued silence that
he required to be encouraged a little into further speech, I re-
marked, "That was a pretty long lecture of yours about Chap-
man, Professor; but to me at least it had the merit of novelty;
for, although he was not altogether unknown to me, my knowl-
edge of his productions has hitherto been exceedingly limited.
Now, however, I shall not rest till I become better acquainted
with them."
"A good resolve that, my lad," he exclaimed, “and one that
all men who are pressed as you are by the exacting hurry and
anxiety of business would do well to make. Ah! if
you
slaves
-
**
100
Afternoons with the Poets.
of the wheel did but know the restful relief from the strain
and friction of business that is to be found in the quiet retreat
of the pages of some of these half-forgotten poets, you would
fly to them daily for a short hour of respite, and would be
made the better and fresher for your work by the healthful rec-
reation and tranquil enjoyment they would afford you. Such
a respite would prolong life and make it brighter, as well as
kindlier and happier. Stick to your resolution then, my old
friend. But we must be getting on."
Following Chapman,” he then resumed, " and his junior by
five years, flourished Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), a poet and
historian who enjoyed the society and friendship of Chapman,
Marlowe, Camden, Fulke Greville, and Shakespeare; and for a
considerable time, in the opinion of many contemporaneous
men of letters, divided the supremacy in poetry with the great
genius last named. Daniel was a voluminous writer both in
prose and verse, and his English was so remarkable for its
purity and copiousness, that Coleridge, after styling him 'one
of the golden writers of our golden Elizabethan age,' has re-
marked of it without exaggeration that his 'diction bears no
mark of time, no distinction of age,' and that it has been, and
as long as our language shall last, will be, so far the language of
the to-day and forever, as that it is more intelligible to us than
the transitory fashions of our own particular age.' In like
manner Mr. Hallam says, 'Daniel's English is eminently pure,
and free from affectation and archaism, and from pedantic in-
novation, with very little that is now obsolete.' The writings
of this poet comprised, besides a volume of sonnets, numerous
translations, masks, pageants, plays, epistles, pastorals, songs,
panegyrical and elegiac poems, and a history in verse of the
civil wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, together
!
Samuel Daniel.
101
with many other occasional productions in prose and verse.
In the earlier part of his life, Daniel's reputation as a poet was
very high, but he lived to feel that it was on the wane, when,
instead of wasting his life by repinings, or embittering it by
jealous rivalries, he sensibly 'turned husbandman, and rented a
farm in Wiltshire, nigh the Devizes,' as we learn from Fuller's
'Worthies,' whither he retired and 'peacefully brought his
days to a close.' There have been various and generally con-
current estimates of Daniel's rank as a poet: His friend Dray-
ton, in a poetical epistle, 'Of Poets and Poetry,' repeats with
apparent approval the opinion, which he says was entertained
by 'some wise men,' that Daniel was 'too much historian in
verse,' and delivers his own judgment that,
"His rhymes were smooth, his meters well did close,
But yet his manner better fitted prose.'
Mr. Hallam says: 'Faithfully adhering to truth, which he does
not suffer so much as an ornamental episode to interrupt, and
equally studious to avoid the bolder figures of poetry, it is not
surprising that Daniel should be little read. *** Both in prose
and in poetry, he is, as to language, among the best writers of
his time, and wanted but a greater confidence in his own pow-
er, or, to speak less indulgently, a greater share of it, to sustain
his correct taste, calm sense, and moral feeling.' Coleridge,
after remarking upon the striking resemblance between Daniel
and Wordsworth, in the correspondent weight and sanity of
their thoughts and sentiments, won not from books, but from
meditative observation, declares of Daniel's sentiments, 'No
frequency can deprive them of their freshness; for, though
they are brought into the full daylight of every reader's com-
prehension, yet are they drawn up from depths which few in
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Afternoons with the Poets.
any age are privileged to visit, into which few in any age have
courage or inclination to descend.' In the judgment of
Southey, 'Daniel frequently writes below his subject and his
strength; but always in a strain of tender feeling, and in lan-
guage as easy and natural as it is pure. For his diction alone,'
continues Southey, 'he would deserve to be studied by all stu-
dents or lovers of poetry, even if his works did not abound
with passages of singular beauty. Thoughtful, graceful, right-
minded and gentle-hearted, there is no poet, in any language,
of whom it may be inferred with more certainty from his writ-
ings that he was an amiable, wise, and good man.' Finally,
Sir Egerton Brydges has discriminated his merits with great
clearness and impartiality: The character of Daniel's genius,'
he says, 'seems to be propriety rather than elevation. His lan-
guage is generally pure and harmonious, and his reflections
just; but his thoughts are too abstract, and appeal rather to
the understanding than to the imagination or the heart; and
he wanted the fire necessary to the loftier flights of poetry.'
Having introduced you to the man and his writings generally,
we will now consider his sonnets. These were first published
in 1592, with the title 'Delia: Contayning Certayne Sonnets;'
and again in 1594, under the title 'Delia and Rosamund Aug-
mented;' and it has been suggested by Mr. Malone that they
were the prototype of Shakespeare's sonnets, which opinion
was espoused by Dr. Drake, the author of 'Shakespeare and
His Times,' who further remarked that there is in Daniel
much of that tissue of abstract thought, and that reiteration
of words which so remarkably distinguish the sonnets of
Shakespeare.' Few will deny that Daniel's sonnets are very
beautiful. They are so full of grace and lightness that I shall
venture to present a comparatively large instalment of them, in
Sonnets from Daniel's "Delia."
103
the confidence that they will afford you the unmixed pleasure
they have given me. Here are four, which are fair specimens.
of the entire collection:
"Look, Delia, how w'esteem the half-blown rose,
The image of thy blush and summer's honour;
Whilst yet her tender bud doth undisclose
That full of beauty Time bestows upon her.
No sooner spreads her glory in the air,
But straight her wide-blown pomp comes to decline:
She then is scorn'd that late adorn'd the fair;
So fade the roses of those cheeks of thine.
No April can revive thy wither'd flowers,
Whose springing grace adorns thy glory now;
Swift speedy Time, feather'd with flying hours,
Dissolves the beauty of the fairest brow:
Then do not thou such treasure waste in vain,
But love now whilst thou may'st be lov'd again.'
"I once may see when years shall wreak my wrong,
When golden hairs shall change to silver wire;
And those bright rays that kindle all this fire
Shall fail in force, their working not so strong.
Then Beauty (now the burthen of my song)
Whose glorious blaze the world doth so admire,
Must yield up all to tyrant Time's desire;
Then fade those flowers that deck'd her pride so long.
When, if she grieve to gaze her in her glass,
Which then presents her winter-wither'd hue,
Go you, my verse, go tell her what she was;
For, what she was she best shall find in you.
Your fiery heat lets not her glory pass,
But (Phoenix-like) shall make her live anew.'
"Beauty, sweet love, is like the morning dew,
Whose short refresh upon the tender green,
104
Afternoons with the Poets.
Cheers for a time, but till the sun doth show,
And straight 'tis gone as it had never been.
Soon doth it fade that makes the fairest flourish,
Short is the glory of the blushing rose;
The hue which thou so carefully dost nourish,
Yet which at length thou must be forc'd to lose,
When thou, surcharg'd with burthen of thy years,
Shalt bend thy wrinkles homeward to the earth,
And that in beauty's lease, expir'd, appears
The date of age, the calends of our death-
But ah! no more-this must not be foretold;
For, women grieve to think they must be old.'
"I must not grieve my love, whose eyes would read
Lines of delight whereon her youth might smile ;
Flowers have a time before they come to seed,
And she is young, and now must sport the while.
And sport, sweet maid, in season of these years,
And learn to gather flowers before they wither,
And where the sweetest blossom first appears,
Let Love and Youth conduct thy pleasures thither!
Lighten forth smiles to clear the clouded air,
And calm the tempest which my sighs do raise;
Pity and smiles do best become the fair,
Pity and smiles must only yield thee praise.
Make me to say, when all my griefs are gone,
Happy the heart that sigh'd for such a one!'
"The next of these worthies," continued the Professor, with-
out giving me any opportunity for comment on Daniel's son-
nets, “in the order of seniority, is Michael Drayton (1563–
1631), whom Ben Jonson rejoiced to call his friend, and of
whom William Browne, the pastoral poet, said,
“Never happier pen
Sung of his loves, his country, and the men,'
Michael Drayton.
105
but whose best and most enduring title to our admiration is
his enchanting poem, 'Nymphidia: The Court of Fairy.' I
shall not undertake to outline Drayton's life, and will only say,
in passing, that, because of the virtuous and honorable tenor of
his actions, and the gentleness and geniality of his disposition,
he was a more general favorite among contemporary men of
letters than any other poet of that day; though another reason
for this might be found in the facts that his genius was not so
exalted as to excite envy or jealousy, while his learning and
talents were so considerable as to command respect. He was
an industrious and voluminous writer, and was conscientious in
his efforts to do good honest work. His most pretentious pro-
duction, and the one by which, after 'Nymphidia,' he is best
known, is the 'Poly-Olbion,' consisting of thirty 'Songs,' com-
prising thirty thousand lines written in Alexandrine couplets,
and which he himself termed 'A Chorographical Description
of all the Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and Other Parts
of this Renowned Isle of Great Britain; with intermixture of
the most Remarkable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, etc., of the
Same.' This remarkable work, which contains many fine de-
scriptive passages, and has numerous lines of great beauty and
sublimity, had the exceptional honor paid it of being annotated
in part—that is to say, the first eighteen of its thirty Books or
'Songs'-by the learned antiquarian, John Selden; and has
elicited from the pen of the candid and judicial Hallam the
following discriminating criticism: 'It contains a topographical
description of England, illustrated with a prodigality of histor-
ical and legendary erudition. Such a poem is essentially de-
signed to instruct, and speaks to the understanding more than
to the fancy. The powers displayed in it are, however, of a
high cast. * * * The style of Drayton is sustained with ex-
106
Afternoons with the Poets.
traordinary ability, on an equable line, from which he seldom
much deviates, neither brilliant nor prosaic; few or no passages
could be marked as impressive, but few are languid or mean.
The language is clear, strong, various, and sufficiently figura-
tive; the stories and fictions interspersed, as well as the general
spirit and liveliness, relieve the heaviness incident to topograph-
ical description. There is probably no poem of this kind in
any other language comparable, together in extent and excel-
lence, to the Poly-Olbion; nor can any one read a portion of it
without admiration for its learned and highly gifted author.
Yet perhaps no English poem, known as well by name, is so
little known beyond its name; for, while its immense length
deters the common reader, it affords, as has just been hinted, no
great harvest for selection, and would be judged very unfairly
by partial extracts.' The only one of Drayton's works that
comes properly within our scope, however, is his 'Idea: the
Shepherd's Garland,' of which Ben Jonson said that he 'found
it pure and perfect poesy.' This 'Garland' was a collection
of pastorals in nine eclogues, interspersed with occasional
sonnets, from which the two that follow have been selected
as specimens of his widely differing styles-the first, de-
scribing a parting with love, being as remarkable for its pre-
ponderance of monosyllables as the other, "To the River An-
kor,' is for the superabundance of its compound words and
epithets:
'Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done; you get no more of me:
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Sonnets from Drayton.
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.'
'Dear Ankor, on whose silver-sanded shore
My soul-shrin'd Saint, my fair Idea lies,
O blessed Brook, whose milk-white swans adore
The crystal stream refined by her eyes,
Where sweet myrrh-breathing Zephyr in the spring
Gently distils his nectar-dropping showers,
Where nightingales in Arden sit and sing,
Amongst the dainty dew-impearled flowers;
Say thus, fair Brook, when thou shalt see thy queen,
Lo, here thy shepherd spent his wandering years;
And in these shades, dear Nymph, he oft had been;
And here to thee he sacrific'd his tears:
Fair Arden, thou my Tempe art alone;
And thou, sweet Ankor, art my Helicon!"
107
"After listening to your examples of both, Professor," I here
interposed, "I am far more agreeably impressed by Daniel's
sonnets than by Drayton's; though I infer that you accord
the higher poetical rank to the latter. Doubtless, Daniel never
wrote anything as exquisitely beautiful as Drayton's 'Nym-
phidia,' and it is probable that his long historical poems are in-
ferior to Drayton's still longer topographical poem; but I am
sure there is nothing in the sonnets from Drayton we have lis-
tened to that is comparable, for artless ideality and rounded re-
alistic fulness, with some of Daniel's single lines and couplets.
•
108
Afternoons with the Poets.
Daniel paints a picture with great minuteness and fidelity, and
his verse is exceedingly melodious."
"I agree with you," he replied; "for although it must be
conceded that Drayton was much above Daniel in reach of
mind, and also in general poetic merit, yet it is no dispraise to
him to say that his sonnets are inferior to Daniel's, since there
are few poets, of any rank in any age, of whom the same may
not be said with equal justice. It is probable that if both these
poets had not surrendered themselves so entirely to the con-
struction and completion of the ponderous poems to which
they sacrificed their powers and graces, and which absorbed all
their time, they would each have attained a far higher poetical
rank than is now assigned them. Indeed, in view of their
undoubted taste, learning, and genius, it is hard to say what
heights they might not have reached but for these cherished
and life-long blunders. I should like to compare views with
you as to those lines and couplets of Daniel's which seem to
have so greatly impressed you, but the day is waning, and I
must hasten forward."
66
The last of these poets, elder than Jonson, to whom I shall
refer, and with a notice of whom we will close the afternoon,
is Sir John Davies (1570-1626), in his day distinguished as a·
lawyer and statesman, as well as poet. The most ambitious
production of this versatile and accomplished man was a poem
on the immortality of the soul, entitled 'Nosce Teipsum: This
Oracle Expounded in two Elegies; First, Of Human Knowledge;
Second, Of the Soul of Man and the Immortality thereof."
This remarkable poem belongs pre-eminently to the region of
the intellect. More philosophical and metaphysical than poet-
ical, it yet abounds in episodical similes which are often ex-
ceedingly pertinent and ingenious. One of these occurs in the
#
Sir John Davies's "Nosce Teipsum."
109
introductory elegy, 'Of Human Knowledge,' and is so curious-
ly freighted with classical allusions-there being no less than
six in three verses, that I venture to quote it:
"What is this Knowledge? but the sky-stol'n fire,
For which the thief,* still chain'd in ice doth sit?
And which the poor rude satyrt did admire,
And needs would kiss, but burnt his lips with it.
"What is it? but the cloudt of empty rain,
Which when Jove's guest embrac'd he monsters got?
Or the false pails,§ which oft being fill'd with pain,
Receiv'd the water, but retain'd it not?
"In fine, what is it? but the fiery coach
Which the youth || sought and sought his death withal?
Or the boy's wings, which when he did approach
The sun's hot beams, did melt and let him fall?'
Curious and thoughtful as this poem certainly is, I am unable
to echo the extravagant praise lavished upon it by one of the
poet's editors in the last century, who declared that 'it is, with-
out dispute, except Spenser's "Faerie Queene," the best poem
that was written in Queen Elizabeth's, or even in King James
the First's time.' Mr. Hallam's estimate is more judicious: he
says, 'Perhaps no language can produce a poem, extending to
so great a length, of more condensation of thought, or in which
fewer languid verses will be found. *** Very few have been
able to preserve a perspicuous brevity without stiffness or ped-
antry (allowance made for the subject and the time), in meta-
physical reasoning, so successfully as Sir John Davies.' After
* Prometheus.
§ The Danaides.
+ In Esop.
|| Phaeton.
+ Ixion.
TIcarus.
110
Afternoons with the Poets.
all is said, however, it must be conceded that very few of the
flowers of true poetry are to be found in it; but its style is
correct and lucid, its language is seldom surpassed in simplicity
and vigor, its sentiment throughout is tempered by good taste
and restrained by solid sense, and many of its thoughts are not-
able for their grave and lofty grandeur. His sonnets are in a
widely dissimilar strain from the 'Nosce Teipsum.' They are
all in the amatory vein, and are as light and fanciful as it is
grave and unideal. In Francis Davison's 'Poetical Rhapsody'
there is a group of ten of Davies's sonnets, addressed to his mis-
tress, under the name of Philomel, from which I have selected
two as examples of the style of his lighter compositions. The
first of these, he himself takes care to inform us, veils under
his love-plaints an allusion to the voyage of Theseus against
the Minotaur:
"My Love is sail'd, against dislike to fight,
Which, like vild monster, threatens his decay;
The ship is Hope, which by Desire's great might
Is swiftly borne towards the wished bay;
The company which with my Love doth fare,
(Though met in one) is a dissenting crew ;
They are Joy, Grief, and never sleeping Care,
And Doubt which ne'er believes good news for true;
Black Fear the flag is, which my ship doth bear,
Which, Dear, take down, if my Love victor be;
And let white Comfort in this place appear,
When Love victoriously returns to me:
Lest I from rock Despair come tumbling down,
And in a sea of tears be forc'd to drown.'
The other sonnet accompanied a gold ring which he sent to his
mistress, with the posy 'pure and endless' inscribed upon it:
F
Sir John Davies's Sonnets.
"If you would know the Love which I you bear,
Compare it to the Ring which your fair hand
Shall make more precious, when you shall it wear;
So my Love's nature you shall understand:
Is it of metal pure? so shall you prove
My Love, which ne'er disloyal thought did stain.
Hath it no end? so endless is my Love,
Unless you it destroy with your disdain.
Doth it the purer wax, the more 'tis tried?
So doth my Love: yet herein they dissent,
That whereas gold, the more 'tis purified
By waxing less doth show some part is spent ;
My Love doth wax more pure by your more trying,
And yet increaseth in the purifying.'
8
199
A
i
111
I
i
Fourth Afternoon.
IV.
WHEN the Professor had ended the sonnets of Sir John
Davies on the previous afternoon, as has been already chron-
icled, he adjourned our session so abruptly as to give me no
opportunity for any comment upon them. I fancied that he
suspected me of having formed a contemptuous opinion of
them, and persuaded myself that his sudden close of the con-
versation and hurried departure were a bit of strategy cun-
ningly devised by him to get rid of the criticism that he felt
to be impending. A little nettled by his stratagem, I was re-
solved that he should not baffle me as easily as he thought;
and so, when we resumed our sessions on the following after-
noon, I mischievously opened all my batteries on the old law-
yer-poet, and bombarded his love-sonnets with all the ridicule
in my magazine. I cited his stiffest periods, droned out his
most pedantic lines, and made merry over his ambitious epi-
thets, strained conceits, and cum brous metaphors, winding up
my scoffing assault with a fusillade of raillery at the Profess-
or's own expense for presuming to palm off such unmitigated
fustian for poetry. But his sweetness of temper was proof
against my raillery, and it only served to kindle an amused
light in his mild eyes-a light which burned the brighter as
my objurgations increased in vehemence, till at length we both
burst into a peal of merry laughter at the comicality of any at-
tempt of mine to pique his vanity or upset the balance of his
evenly tempered disposition.
116
Afternoons with the Poets.
"You are the most provoking old fellow living," I exclaim-
ed, when the merriment had subsided. "I verily believe there
is nothing in the world that can make you downright mad."
That this was far from being the case, however, no one knew
better than myself, as I remembered before the words had well
passed my lips; for I had once seen his calm eyes blaze with
mighty anger, and his comely features transformed by fierce
wrath, when he dashed a huge brute to earth who had assaulted
a sweet young maiden with base intent, and who was arrested
by the dear old boy's opportune arrival. It was my own sister,
and I had reached the scene just as the burly ruffian made his
last murderous spring at the Professor's throat, to be dashed to
the ground a limp and inert mass. Scarcely had I uttered my
jesting accusation, then, when his blue eye met mine with a
meaning glance, and instinctively our hands were clasped in a
grasp
whose heartiness showed that the incident I have related
was still green in both our memories. Man-like, neither of us
spoke what was in his "heart of heart," but instead, the dear
old lad, going craftily back to my tirade against Sir John's son-
nets, went on as if no by-play had intervened.
"Do you recollect the speech," he said, "that Cervantes puts
in the mouth of Sancho, in Don Quixote, 'Every man is as
Heaven made him, and sometimes a deal worse? Well, just so
is it with some poets-they are as Heaven made them, and
sometimes a deal worse. Sancho's is the only kind of criticism
that fits them. I am afraid Sir John Davies is one of this
kind. At all events, I did not quote his love verses as models,
but as marking the progress of the sonnet and its influence on
our literature. I wished you to see that if it had soared at
times, at other times it had crept; that if it were sometimes
richly musical, it also was sometimes an inharmonious croak;
Sonnets by James the First.
117
that if it were now resplendent with the seven listed colors, it
now went shabbily in humble drab or gray. Sir John's son-
nets occupied a mean somewhere between these extremes, and
the functions they performed were not altogether fruitless of
beneficent results, as I might easily show if we had the leisure
for it. But we have not, and we will now resume our inter-
rupted quest.—There are two sonnets belonging to the period
immediately antecedent to Ben Jonson's prime, by a writer-I
will not malign the name of poet by applying it to him—whose
lifetime nearly corresponded with that of Sir John Davies.
The sonnets I have in mind were written by James the First,
and some interest attaches to them as the products of a royal
pen. Solely on this account, then, and as in some sort liter-
ary curiosities, I reproduce them. The first is in honor of Sir
Philip Sidney, and is one of two versions-in English and
Latin-that the royal poetaster made on this theme. The
English version is as follows:
"Thou mighty Mars, the lord of soldiers brave,
And thou Minerva, that does in wit excel,
And thou Apollo, who does knowledge have
Of ev'ry art that from Parnassus fell,
With all your sisters that thereon do dwell,
Lament for him who duly serv'd you all,
Whom in you wisely all your arts did mell,
Bewail, I say, his unexpected fall;
I need not in remembrance for to call
His race, his youth, the hope had of him ay,
Since that in him doth cruel death appal
Both manhood, wit, and learning every way;
But yet he doth in bed of honor rest,
And evermore of him shall live the best.'
The other specimen, written while James was yet King of Scot-
Um
118
Afternoons with the Poets.
land, was prefixed to a manuscript translation of the 'Triumphs
of Petrarch,' found in the College Library in Edinburgh, signed
'J. Rex:'
"We find by proof that into every age
In Phœbus' art some glistering star did shine,
Who, worthy scholars to the Muses sage,
Fulfill'd their countries with their works divine.
So Homer was a sounding trumpet fine
Amongst the Greeks, into his learned days;
So Virgil was among the Romans syne
A sprite sublim'd, a pillar of their praise!
So lofty Petrarch his renown did blaze
In tongue Italic, in a sugar'd style,
And to the circled skies his name did raise:
For he, by poems that he did compile,
Led in triumph Love, Chastness, Death, and Fame:
But thou triumphs o'er Petrarch's proper name!''
"Notwithstanding the stiff undergrowth of pedantry in
these sonnets, Professor," I remarked, "they yet have an odor
of the heather. No one could mistake the soil on which grew
the words 'mell' and 'syne,' or the tongue which gave ‘into'
the peculiar significance it carries in several of these lines.
With these exceptions, while their style is somewhat starched,
they are quite remarkable specimens of good English. Cer-
tainly they contain fewer archaisms than are visible in the
writings of many of his eminent English contemporaries, and
are much freer from pedagogical expressions than James's lit-
erary reputation warrants one to expect."
“We should form a very imperfect judgment of the true
literary rank of James," he replied, "if we accepted without
qualification the pert flings of wits or the distorted reports of
partisans as to his literary or intellectual calibre. It has been
James's Literary Character.
119
easy to name him 'Scotch pedagogue,' 'learned fool,' 'royal
pedant,' and the like--far easier than to analyze the elements.
of his character, at once peculiar, unattractive, and contradicto-
ry—and no less easy to overlook or underrate his merits as a
writer and thinker, and even as a man. If we would do him
justice, we must reflect that if he was a fool, he was a learned
and in many respects a wise fool. His folly consisted mainly
in his inapt or untimely exhibition or application of his learn-
ing, and in his tendency-derived partly from his faulty edu-
cation, partly from the conceit he entertained of his intellectual
powers, and partly from his overweening estimate of the attri-
butes and dignity of the kingly office-to travel outside of his
own orbit and invade the sphere of others. He was even vain
enough, under the inspiration of his divine right as a king, to
fancy that he could teach his bishops and clergy, his soldiers
and statesmen, his cobbler and his tailor, the art and mystery
of their several crafts. Generally, however, he was shrewd, as-
tute, crafty, clear - headed, patient, and practical, as any other
true Scot; but, like all of that canny race, his shrewdest and
most practical sayings and doings had a tinge of the ludicrous,
or at least of the incongruous. Sydney Smith's capital joke at
the expense of the fondness of the Scotch for metaphysics is
a good illustration of the way this might happen, and it was a
very common way with James. The Scotch,' said Smith, ‘are
so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love meta-
physically: I once overheard a young lady of my acquaintance,
at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the
music, “What you say, my lord, is very true of love in the aib-
stract, but " Here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and
the rest was lost." Now, there is nothing intrinsically ridiculous
in metaphysics, nor is a fondness for it either comical or an ev-
120
Afternoons with the Poets.
idence of folly or pedantry; but its exhibition at such a time
and manner, and in connection with such a topic, is exquisitely
ludicrous. And this is what James, urged on by his conceit.
and his idiosyncrasies, was perpetually doing: making things,
in themselves wise and sensible and desirable, ridiculous by
their association with unpropitious times and incongruous cir-
cumstances. As to his pedantry, there is this to be said: it
seldom took the form of an ostentatious parade of verbal trivi-
alities, but more often was an unconscious display of genuine
but misplaced learning. Some of his writings-those, for in-
stance, in which he was in real earnest―are remarkable for its
absence, as well as for their dignity and simplicity and the ex-
cellence of their English. For example, take his 'Basilicon
Doron,' addressed to his eldest and dearest son, Prince Henry,
that youth of glorious promise who was the friend and pupil
of Raleigh. As specimens of pure and expressive English,
many and extended passages of this treatise will compare fa-
vorably even with our English Bible. It is true that it is here
and there marred by the introduction of Scotticisms and of oc-
casional words borrowed from the French or from the Greek
and Latin; but these are comparatively infrequent, and in the
main it is a model of simplicity, strength, and purity. To con-
vince you that I am not exaggerating, I will quote several brief
passages from this once famous work; the first being an ex-
tract from the king's advice to the prince on his choice of
servants and associates:' 'Chuse you your own servants for
your own use,' he says, 'and not for the use of others; and
since ye must be communis parens to all your people, chuse in-
differently out of all quarters; not respecting other men's appe-
tites, but their own qualities. For as you must command all,
so reason would ye should be served of all.-Be a daily watch-
The "Basilicon Doron."
121
man over your own servants, that they obey your laws precise-
ly for how can your laws be kept in the country if they be
broken at your care! Be homely or strange with them as ye
think their behaviour deserveth and their nature may bear.-
Employ every man as ye think him qualified, but use not one
in all things, lest he wax proud and be envied by his fellows.—
As for the other sort of your companie and servants, they ought
to be of perfect age, see they be of a good fame; otherwise
what can the people think but that ye have chosen a companion
unto you according to your own humour, and so have preferred
those men for the love of their vices and crimes that ye knew
them to be guiltie of. For the people, that see you not within,
cannot judge of you but according to the outward appearance
of your actions and company, which only is subject to their
sight.' The second extract is a part of his counsel to the
prince how to conduct himself toward the nobility: ‘Teach
your nobility,' says the sagacious father, 'to keep your lawes as
precisely as the meanest ; fear not their orping, or being dis-
contented, as long as ye rule well: for their pretended reforma-
tion of princes taketh never effect, but where evil government
proceedeth. Acquaint yourself so with all the honest men of
your barons and gentlemen, giving access so open and affable to
make their own suites to you themselves, and not to employ
the great lordes their intercessors; so shall ye bring to a meas-
ure their monstrous backes. And for their barbarous feîdes
[feuds], put the laws to due execution made by men there-
anent; beginning ever rathest at him that ye love best and is
oblished unto you, to make him an example to the rest. Make
all your reformations to begin at your elbow, and so by degrees
to the extremities of the land.' In another portion of the
treatise he counsels the prince as to his own conduct: 'A king
f
122
Afternoons with the Poets.
is set as one on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all
the people gazinglie do behold; and, however just in the dis-
charge of his office, yet, if his behaviour be light or dissolute in
indifferent actions, the people, who see but the outward part,
conceive preoccupied conceits of the king's inward intention,
which, although with time, the trier of all truth, will evanish by
the evidence of the contrarie effect, yet, interim patitur justus,
and prejudged conceits will, in the mean time, breed contempt,
the mother of rebellion and disorder. Besides, the indifferent
actions and behaviour of a man have a certain holding and de-
pendence upon virtue or vice, according as they are used or
ruled. And remember to be plaine and sensible in your lan-
guage; for besides, it is the tongue's office to be the messenger
of the mind; it may be thought a point of imbecilitie of spirit
in a king to speak obscurely, much more untrewly, as if he
stood in awe of any in uttering his thoughts.
9.99
6
"If your extracts are fair samples of the entire performance,
Professor, your comparison of the style of the Basilicon
Doron' with that of the accepted version of the Bible is not
as extravagant as it at first seemed. Of course you intended
to leave out of sight the difference in the nature of the subjects
treated in the two productions—a difference too vast to afford
any common basis for a comparison. Nor could you mean to
institute a comparison between the two in the particulars of
grace, dignity, ease, picturesqueness, and elevation of style; in
all which I presume the 'Basilicon' is immeasurably inferior
to the Bible. Your comparison, then, I take it, has reference
to the diction solely; and in this respect the English of your
extracts will stand the test."
"L
"You have taken my meaning rightly," he replied; "and
now, if you have sufficiently indulged your propensity for vag-
}
Dr. John Donne.
123
abond digression, we will go back to the sonnet.-I propose
now to present a group of writers who flourished contempo-
raneously with Ben Jonson, or were his more immediate suc-
cessors, and who link his times with those of Milton, when a
new departure was taken on a higher plane. This group does
not comprise nearly all of those who were then esteemed or
who aspired to be called poets, but embraces those who were
among the more noteworthy writers of sonnets; and as Jon-
son's life extended from 1573 to 1637, you will perceive that
some, whose sonnets I shall pass in review, covered all those
years, while others lapped over into the period when Milton
came upon the stage. Indeed, several of these latter even out-
lived Milton, but their productions distinctively belonged to the
time intervening between him and Jonson.
K
"The first of these in time was the celebrated Dr. John
Donne (1573-1631), who, besides being an accomplished schol-
ar, a prolific writer in prose and verse, and the great preacher
of his day (Coleridge pronounced him 'the greatest preacher
of the seventeenth century'), was also a man of the severest rec-
titude, whose convictions, having been the result of elaborate
and conscientious investigation, were adhered to with inflexible
tenacity, and propagated with all gentleness, indeed, but with
intense earnestness. Donne, like Sir John Davies, was a meta-
physical poet, and in his day was esteemed the head of that
school; which, fortunately for English poetry, has had few fol-
lowers. He is not what Dr. Johnson would have called 'quot-
able:' very few of his lines and none of his extended passages
have ever retained a hold upon the memory or passed into pop-
ular currency; and the most of his poems are repellent by rea-
son of their sombreness, quaintness, and prosaic cast. They
are almost utterly barren of description and narrative; being
:
124
Afternoons with the Poets.
analytical rather than graphic or emotional, they rarely appeal
to the imagination through the passions or affections; and
when they are not complimentary, elegiac, or satirical, they
take the form of dogmatic teaching, or of philosophical or re-
ligious reasoning. His sonnets share the prevailing tone of
his other poems; none of them are amatory or fanciful, and
they are generally couched in a strain of religious sentimental-
ism, with an undertone of melancholy which is tempered by
faith and enlivened by Christian hope. The best known of
these, comprising nearly all he wrote, form an imperfectly con-
nected poem consisting of sixteen sonnets, which are variations
suggested by the general theme, and thus have a remote re-
lationship to one another. They are severely, and at times im-
pressively introspective: in some he lays his heart bare in con-
fession, bewailing his sinfulness, the depravity of his nature,
and the temptations that have beset and overmastered him; in
others, he gives voice amidst many sighs and tears to his pas-
sionate longings for the grace of repentance, and to piteous
pleadings for pardon; and others, still, are contemplative epi-
sodes on such momentous topics as Death and the Judgment,
God's Wrath and the ineffable Love of Christ. Interspersed
with these confessions, lamentations, and pleadings are strange
metaphysical speculations on the nature of man's being, as to
the influences of the animate and inanimate creation upon the
soul, and concerning the power and attributes of God. The
subjects thus discussed are of the most exalted character-some
of them are of transcendent interest as well as grandeur-and
they glow with intense thought, and are penetrated by a con-
viction so vivid that to the author's mind they must have
seemed impending realities. But notwithstanding the tremen-
dous greatness of his subjects, and the vividness of his own re-
Donne's Sonnets.
125
alization of them, Donne fails to reach the heights of true sub-
limity in his poetry: he has not the faculty of transporting
others so that they see with his eyes; the thoughts and images
which affect him so powerfully make no impression on them,
and, instead of being overpowered with awe by his conceptions,
we gaze in mild wonder upon the spectacles that he evokes,
and calmly criticise their lurid and artificial grandeur. The
two sonnets that follow, respectively on the Judgment and
apostrophizing Death, are in this author's most characteristic
vein :
'At the round earth's imagin'd corners blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All, whom th' flood did, and fire shall overthrow;
All, whom war, death, age, ague's tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain; and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space;
For, if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there. Here on this holy ground
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good,
As if thou had'st seal'd my pardon with thy blood.'
"Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those, whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poor death; nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy picture be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow:
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
43
ย
་
126
Afternoons with the Poets.
Thou'rt slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well,
And better than thy stroke. Why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally;
And death shall be no more, death, thou shalt die."
"There is something delightfully impudent in Donne's con-
temptuous banter of Death in the last of these sonnets," I ex-
claimed. "Why, not content with telling the King of Terrors.
to his beard that he is of no great account, notwithstanding his
wide renown, and that he is a slave who must not put on high
and mighty airs with John Donne, the poet rubs in the insult.
by the taunt that his sting is less potent even than an old
woman's charm. The concluding couplet in a measure redeems
the extravagant braggadocio that precedes it. But yet how far
inferior in true grandeur it all is to St. Paul's triumphant ejac-
ulation in his sublime epistle to the Corinthians, ‘O death,
where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? Or to
that eloquent apostrophe to Death at the close of Raleigh's
'History of the World:' 'The Kings and Princes of the world
have always laid before them the Actions but not the Ends of
those great ones which preceded them. They are always trans-
ported with the glory of the one, but they never mind the mis-
ery of the other, till they find the experience in themselves.
They neglect the advice of God, while they enjoy life or hope
it; but they follow the counsel of Death upon his first ap-
proach. It is he that puts into man all the wisdom of the
world without speaking a word; which God, with all the words
of his law, promises, threats, doth not infuse. Death, which
hateth and destroyeth man, is believed; God, which hath made
him and loves him, is always deferred. "I have considered
Raleigh's Apostrophe to Death.
127
(saith Solomon) all the works that are under the Sun, and be-
hold all is vanity and vexation of spirit," but who believes it
till Death tells it us? It is Death alone that can suddenly
make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent
that they are but abjects, and humbles them at the instant;
makes them cry, complain, and repent, yea, even at their fore-
past happiness. He takes the account of the Rich, and proves
him a Beggar, a naked Beggar which hath interest in nothing
but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before
the eyes of the most beautiful, and makes them see therein their
deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge it. *** 0
eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise,
thou hath persuaded; what none hast dared, thou hast done;
and whom all the world hath flattered, thou only hast cast out
of the world and despised: thou hast drawn together all the
far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition of
Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, HIC
JACET.'
199
"I congratulate you," said the Professor, when I had con-
cluded, "on your acquaintance with this grand old worthy, and
trust it is one of the good results of our conversations. Let
me hope that your intimacy with the remarkable work, from
which you have quoted this magnificent passage, extends far-
ther than to its title-page and colophon."
"Pshaw! Professor," I exclaimed, "a truce to your left-
handed compliments; and have done with your covert flings
at my possibly superficial acquaintance with Raleigh's great
history, because the passage I quoted happens to be perilously
near the colophon."
"Content, my lad," he quietly rejoined, and resumed his
prolusion." The sonnets of William Drummond" (1585-
"
9
128
Afternoons with the Poets.
1649), he began, "better known as Drummond of Hawthorn-
den- the friend whom Ben Jonson walked from London to
Scotland to visit in 1619, and in whose house he spent some
time—are in a very different style from those of Donne, both
in matter and manner; being correct, copiously flowing, easy
and unaffectedly elegant in language, and gracefully poetic in
sentiment. Although some of them, like Donne's, are of a re-
ligious tenor, none are tumid or sombre; but, whatever their
subject, they all sparkle with brightness and vivacity. Their
excellence extorted warm commendations from Hazlitt, than
whom few critics have been more accurate in their judgments,
or more abstemious of praise. Speaking of them, he says, 'I
think they come as near as almost any others to the perfection
of this kind of writing, which should embody a sentiment, and
every shade of a sentiment, as it varies with time and place
and humor, with the extravagance or lightness of a momentary
impression.' Hallam's estimate, though a high one, is more re-
served and technical. The sonnets of Drummond of Haw-
thornden,' he says, 'the most celebrated in that class of poets,
have obtained, probably, as much praise as they deserve. But
they are polished and elegant, free from conceit and bad taste,
in pure unblemished English; some are pathetic or tender in
sentiment, and if they do not show much originality, at least
would have acquired a fair place among the Italians of the six-
teenth century.' In connection with this estimate of Drum-
mond's sonnets, and suggested by them, Mr. Hallam vouchsafes
some judicious remarks on the structure of the sonnet and the
difficulties environing it, which are interesting and technically
valuable, and will scarcely come under your ban as being a di-
gression. 'The difficulty,' he observes, ' of finding the neces-
sary rhymes in our language has caused most who have at-
On the Structure of the Sonnet.
129
tempted the sonnet to swerve from the laws which cannot be
transgressed, at least to the degree they have often dared, with-
out losing the unity for which that complex mechanism was
contrived. Certainly, three quatrains of alternate rhymes, suc-
ceeded by a couplet, which Drummond, like many other Eng-
lish poets, has sometimes given us, is the very worst form of
the sonnet, even if, in deference to a scanty number of Italian
precedents, we allow it to pass as a sonnet at all. The legiti-
mate sonnet consists of two quatrains and two tercets; as
much skill, to say the least, is required for the management of
the latter as the former. The rhymes of the last six lines are
capable of many arrangements; but by far the worst, and also
the least common in Italy, is that we usually adopt, the fifth
and sixth rhyming together, frequently after a full pause, so
that the sonnet ends with the point of an epigram. The best
form, as the Italians hold, is the rhyming together of the three
uneven and the three even lines; but, as our language is less
rich in consonant terminations, there can be no objection to
what has abundant precedents even in theirs, the rhyming of
the first and fourth, second and fifth, third and sixth lines.
This, with a break in the sense in the third line, will make a
real sonnet, which Shakespeare, Milton, Bowles, and Words-
worth have often failed to give us, even when they have given
us something good instead. *** We possess, indeed, noble
poetry in the form of the sonnet; yet with us it seems more
fitted for grave than amatory composition; in the latter we
miss the facility and grace of our native English measures, the
song, the madrigal, or the ballad.'-Those of Drummond's son-
nets which I shall cite afford specimens of both his methods—
the last two belonging to the class which Mr. Hallam, perhaps
too sweepingly, describes as 'the very worst form of the son-
...
130
Afternoons with the Poets.
sure.
net,' and the first two not coming so entirely under this cen-
Two of these sonnets are invocations to Sleep; and I
have chosen them because, while fairly representing Drum-
mond's style, and helping more clearly to illustrate the modifi-
cations the sonnet has undergone, they also have a special in-
terest as being variations on a theme treated of in one of Sid-
ney's sonnets. A comparison of them with Sidney's sonnet to
'Sleep' will reveal some curious correspondencies and equally
curious differences, both in the conception and treatment,
which I shall leave you to trace out at your leisure. Mean-
time, listen to Drummond:
"I know that all beneath the Moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought
In Time's great periods shall return to nought;
That fairest states have fatal nights and days.
I know that all the Muses' heavenly lays,
With toil of sprite, which are so dearly bought,
As idle sounds, of few, or none are sought;
That there is nothing lighter than vain praise.
I know frail beauty's like the purple flow'r,
To which one moon oft birth and death affords;
That love a jarring is of mind's accords,
Where sense and will bring under reason's power;
Know what I list, this all cannot me move,
But that, alas! I both must write and love.'
"Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft Rest,
Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings,
Indifferent host to shepherds and to kings,
Sole comforter of minds which are opprest!
Lo! by thy charming rod, all breathing things
Lie slumb'ring, with forgetfulness possest;
And yet o'er me to spread thy drowsy wings
Thou spar'st, alas! who cannot be thy guest.
Sonnets from Drummond.
Since I am thine, O come, but with that face
To inward light which thou art wont to show,
With feigned solace ease a true-felt wo!
Or if, deaf god, thou do deny that grace,
Come as thou wilt, and what thou wilt bequeath!
I long to kiss the image of my death.'
"Sweet Spring, thou com'st with all thy goodly train,
Thy head with flames, thy mantle bright with flow'rs!
The Zephyrs curl the green locks of the plain,
The Clouds for joy in pearls weep down their show'rs.
Sweet Spring, thou com'st-but ah! my pleasant hours,
And happy days, with thee come not again!
The sad memorials only of my pain
Do with thee come, which turn my sweets to sours!
Thou art the same which still thou wert before;
Delicious, lusty, amiable, fair:
But she whose breath embalm'd thy wholesome air
Is gone! nor gold nor gems can her restore.
Neglected Virtue! seasons go and come,
When thine, forgot, lie closed in a tomb.'
'Care's charming Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Destroy my languish ere the day be light,
With dark forgetting of my care's return;
And let the day be long enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth;
Let wat'ry eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the troubles of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, fond image of my fond desires!
To model forth the passions of to-morrow;
Let never rising Sun approve your tears,
To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow:
Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain,
And never wake to feel the day's disdain.'
131
132
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Thomas Carew (1589-1639) was a wit, a man of pleasure,
and a gay
and accomplished courtier, as well as one of the most
charming lesser poets of this period. His best poems, which
are chiefly amatory, are remarkable for their crisp and harmo-
nious brevity, and for occasional lines and couplets of exceed-
ing beauty and expressiveness; but singularly enough, only two
of them are sonnets. This is the more marvellous since he was
a prolific writer, and was a master of the ease and gracefulness.
of style, the precision and sententiousness of language, the
facility of versification, and the lightness and sprightliness of
fancy which are favorable to the production of the sonnet in its
highest perfection. It must be admitted that, few as are his
sonnets, they are are not such as to make us greatly deplore
that there are no more; and it is to be doubted whether, if
strictly classed, they should be allowed to pass as sonnets at
all. The one which I shall quote first was addressed to his
mistress, under the caption, 'The Carver.' The other, and tech-
nically the most imperfect, was entitled 'Love's Force,' and is a
terse description of the development of Love from an undis-
criminating appetite into an intelligent and congenial choice:
"A Carver, having loved too long in vain,
Hewed out the portraiture of Venus' son
In marble rock, upon the which did rain
Small drizzling drops that from a fount did run ;
Imagining the drops would either wear
His fury out, or quench his living flame:
But when he saw it bootless did appear,
He swore the water did augment the same;
So I, that seek in verse to carve thee out,
Hoping thy beauty will my flame allay,
Viewing my lines impolished all throughout,
Find my will rather to my love obey;
•
Robert Herrick.
That with the Carver I my work do blame,
Finding it still the augmenter of my flame.'
"In the first ruder age, when love was wild,
Not yet by laws reclaimed, not reconciled
To order, nor by reason manned, but flew,
Full illum'd by nature, on the instant view,
Upon the wings of appetite, at all
The eye could fair or sense delightful call,
Election was not yet; but as their cheap
Food from the oak, or the next acorn heap,
As water from the nearest spring or brook,
So men their undistinguished females took
By chance, not choice. But soon the heavenly spark,
That in man's bosom lurked, broke through this dark
Confusion; then the noblest breast first felt
Itself for its own proper object melt.'
133
"But the most delightful of all the minor English poets of
the age we are considering, and rarely equalled in any other,
was Robert Herrick (1591-1662). Many of his poems have
the true lyrical ring, and all his verse is remarkable for the per-
fection of its structure, its airiness of thought and gracefulness
of expression, its exuberant joyousness, the variety of its mod-
ulation, and the rich fulness of its harmony. He is unrivalled
among poets for the jocund gladness and fresh blitheness of
his carollings, all of which breathe a perpetual. May of youth
and spring-time, and remind the reader of the passage in Sir
Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia,' where he describes 'a shepherd's boy
piping as though he should never be old.' His poems, which
are as notable for their brevity as for their musical richness, are
bursts of song as free and unstudied as the notes of a bird.
No English poet is less conventional than he, and yet few are
as free from offences against good taste, and from violations of
1
134
Afternoons with the Poets.
judicious literary restraints. His fancy is playful, hilarious,
and daringly familiar, but is lifted out of the commonplace by
the ease with which it transmutes common things-simple be-
liefs, ordinary customs and usages, and the most trivial happen-
ings of daily life-into golden coinages of fairy-land, or into
pictures glowing with love and beauty. Herrick wrote no
long poem; the longest being his charming descriptive pas-
toral, 'Corinna's Going a Maying,' the nearest rival in our
tongue to Spenser's 'Epithalamion,' and which it resembles as
being an outburst of spontaneous gayety and youthful glad-
ness, inspired by love and perfect physical enjoyment. The sub-
jects of his verse are infinitely various, but its dominant themes
are youth and jollity, love, music and flowers, simple home de-
lights and country pleasures, and the rich folk-lore of holiday
customs and fairy fictions. These, relieved very rarely by some
of a graver cast, caused him to be christened by his contempo-
raries 'Anacreon Herrick,' and his 'Hesperides,' which is the
title he gave his collected works, are certainly very like the
grape-inspired verse of the old Greek in their easy negligence
and graceful abandon. His sonnets, if tried by the severe
standard of Mr. Hallam, are far from being correct, and will
scarcely serve for models; but they are very delightful, never-
theless, being enlivened by his habitual buoyant gayety and
airy fancifulness; though sometimes their ringing gladness is
softened by an accompaniment of gentle seriousness. The first
of these that I shall quote is doubly interesting-for its intrin-
sic beauty, and because it is the poet's own synoptical outline
of his poetical creations, or as he terms it, 'The Argument' of
his Hesperides:
"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July-flowers;
Sonnets by Herrick.
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white;
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall,
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.'
135
Another of his sonnets, 'To the Genius of His House,' has a
bosky sweetness that is peculiarly his own:
"Command the roof, great Genius, and from thence
Into this house pour down thy influence,
That through each room a golden pipe may run
Of living water by the benizon;
Fulfill the larders, and by strength'ning bread
Be evermore thy bins replenished.
Next, like a bishop, consecrate my ground,
That lucky fairies here may dance their round;
And, after that, lay down some silver pence,
The master's charge and care to recompense;
Charm then the chambers; make the beds for ease,
More than for peevish pining sicknesses;
Fix the foundation fast, and let the roof
Grow old with time, but yet keep weather-proof.'
Here is one addressed to 'The Right Honorable Mildmay, Earl
of Westmoreland,' in which the poet asserts the supremacy of
poetry over mere worldly rank with downright English man-
liness, but gracefully blends his plain speech with genial
courtesy:
136
Afternoons with the Poets.
"You are a lord, an earl, nay more, a man,
Who writes sweet numbers well as any can;
If so, why then are not these verses hurl'd,
Like Sibyls' leaves, throughout the ample world?
What is a jewel, if it be not set
Forth by a ring or some rich carcanet?
But being so, then the beholders cry,
See, see a gem, as rare as Bælus' eye.
Then public praise does run upon the stone,
For a most rich, a rare, a precious one.
Expose your jewels then unto the view,
That we may praise them, or themselves prize you.”
Virtue conceal'd, with Horace you'll confess,
Differs not much from drowsy slothfulness.'
The last of my selections from this poet is a 'Parting Verse'
to his friend, Mrs. Bridget Lowman, on leaving her house after
an annual feast at which he had been a guest. It is one of
the latest of his productions, and was written when his 'silver
hairs' admonished him that he might never see another anni-
versary of the good lady's hospitality. Note the apt charac-
terization of his own poetry in the concluding couplet:
"Loth to depart, but yet at last each one
Back must now go to 's habitation;
Not knowing thus much, when we once do sever,
Whether or no that we shall meet here ever.
As for myself, since time a thousand cares
And griefs hath fill'd upon my silver hairs,
'Tis to be doubted whether I next year,
Or no, shall give you a re-meeting here.
If die I must, then my last vow shall be,
You'll with a tear or two remember me,
Your sometime poet; but if fates do give
Me longer date, and more fresh springs to live;
Giles Fletcher.
Oft as your field shall her old age renew,
Herrick shall make the meadow-verse for you.'
137
"Nearly contemporaneous with Herrick were the gifted
brothers, Phineas (1584?-1650) and Giles Fletcher (1586?-
1623), George Wither (1588-1677), William Browne (1590-
1645), Francis Quarles (1592-1644), and George Herbert
(1593-1632). No sonnets were written by either of the
Fletchers or by Quarles; those by Wither, though compara-
tively numerous, bear but a small proportion to his other writ
ings; of the few examples left by Browne, the quality is not
such as to make us yearn for more; and Herbert wrote a good-
ly number, whose devotion is so rapt, and whose piety so fer-
vid, as to supply the place of fancy and imagination-though I
would not have you infer they are destitute of these and other
essential attributes of poetry."
"I am disappointed, Professor, that there are no sonnets by
Giles Fletcher; for, having read his 'Christ's Victorie in Heav-
en,' 'Christ's Victorie on Earth,' 'Christ's Triumph Over
Death,' and 'Christ's Triumph After Death,' and recalling Mil-
ton's grateful acknowledgment of indebtedness to the first
named for one of the most striking passages in his great epic,
I had expected Fletcher's sonnets to be of a high order, and at
least that they would have had something of the flavor of those
by his master, Spenser."
"It is a reasonable cause for disappointment," he replied;
"but the devout and impassioned author of 'Christ's Vic-
tory' had little taste for airy or amatory verse of any kind;
and you will remember that as yet the sonnet had not fully
emancipated itself from those restricted fields. Besides, he
was not a succinct writer, or given to condensation of thought,
and the technical restraints and narrow limitations of this
•
138
Afternoons with the Poets.
stanza would doubtless have been irksome to him. It is there-
fore well for his reputation, perhaps, that he wrote no son-
nets."
"Nevertheless," I objected, "I prefer to nurse my disap-
pointment that he has not left us any, rather than join you in
congratulations that he has not left us poor ones."
"Have it your own way, my dear fellow; have it your own
way," he replied; "but as I have a good deal to say, and only
a short time to say it in, we will now drop all side issues, and
for the remainder of the day I shall hope to be allowed to
pursue the previous question without interruption.-George
Wither is the next in order. His sonnets were the fruit of
his early years, the most of them having been written before
he was twenty-four years old, on the occasion of the death of
the lamented Prince Henry, which event they celebrate with
manly tenderness and genuine sincerity. His sonnets on
'Prince Henry's Obsequies' are forty-five in number; and, as
might be inferred from their subject, are elegiac. He himself,
in his dedication of them to Robert Lord Sidney, styles them
"These Elegiac-Sonnets.' Their gentleness and sympathetic
kindliness are in strong contrast with the strident tone of his
subsequent writings, which, having been written, as Southey
says, 'under the avowed persuasion that he was appointed to
be the national monitor,' were generally severely as well as
fearlessly censorious of abuses or wickednesses, especially when
existing in high places. Bitter as were his satires-and nearly
all his poems that were not on religious subjects were such
as has been justly observed by Southey, his satire ‘was general;
there is not a personal allusion throughout, and his poems con-
tain not a libellous line, nor an unseemly expression, nor an
immoral thought. *** They abound in curious as well as in-
Wither's Sonnets.
139
teresting matter, and strains of sounder or manlier morality are
not to be found in any of the English poets.' Like Shake-
speare's, Wither's sonnets form a continuous poem, which is
varied by numerous excursions more or less immediately sug-
gested by the general subject. If read by itself, each sonnet.
seems independent and complete; but when read with the oth-
ers, its bearing upon and relationship to them become percep-
tible, and sensibly heighten the general effect. In the opening
sonnet, after giving vent to his own grief, the poet condoles
with the 'poor world-divided Isle' of Britain upon the de-
struction of the high hopes it had centred on its 'sweet Hen-
ry; and in successive sonnets he addresses himself to the fa-
ther and mother of the dead prince, James the First and his
Queen; to the prince's brother, afterward Charles the First;
to his sister Elizabeth, who became the hapless Queen of Bo-
hemia; and, finally, to the Court and nobility. The remaining
eighteen or twenty are tender and sometimes passionate re-
callings of those many gracious qualities and attractive graces
and excellences of the prince which had excited the hopes of
his countrymen, and the remembrance of which made the grief
of the poet and of the nation all the more poignant. So
many of these sonnets are noteworthy, either for the curious
illustrations of the times they afford, or for their numerous
expressive phrases, or for lines and passages in which highly
wrought poetic feeling is clad in appropriate diction, that I
hesitate which to choose. On the whole, perhaps, the two ad-
dressed respectively to the King and Queen, and another apos-
trophizing Death, possess the greatest interest at this day, and
this decides me to reproduce them, thus:
"For thee, Great James! my springs of sorrow run,
For thee my Muse a heavy song doth sing,
į.
4
140
Afternoons with the Poets.
Thou hast lost more in losing of thy Son,
Than they that lose the title of a King.
Needs must the pains that do disturb the head
Disease the body throughout every part;
I therefore should have seem'd a member dead,
If I had had no feeling of this smart.
But oh! I grieve, and yet I grieve the less,
Thy Kingly gift so well prevail'd to make him
Fit for a Crown of endless happiness,
And that it was th' Almighty's hand did take him,
Who was himself a book for Kings to pore on,
And might have been thy ΒΑΣΙΛΙΚΟΝ ΔΩΡΟΝ.
"For our fair Queen my grief is no less moving,
There's none could e'er more justly boast of child;
For he was every way most nobly loving,
Most full of manly courage, and yet mild.
Methinks I see what heavy discontent
Beclouds her brow and overshades her eyne;
Yea, I do feel her loving heart lament;
And earnest thought conveys the grief to mine.
I see she notes the sadness of the Court,
Thinks how that here, or there, she saw him last;
Remembers his sweet speech, his graceful sport,
And such like things to make her Passion last.
But what mean I? let grief my speeches smother!
No tongue can tell the sorrows of the Mother.'
"O cruel and insatiable Death!
Would none suffice, would none suffice but he?
What pleasure was it more to stop his breath,
Than to have choak'd, or kill'd, or poison'd me?
My life for his, with thrice three millions more,
We would have given as a ransom to thee;
But since thou in his loss hast made us poor,
Foul Tyrant! it shall never honour do thee;
>
William Browne.
For thou hast shown thyself a spiteful fiend.
Yea, Death! thou didst envy his happy state,
And therefore thought'st to bring it to an end;
But see, see whereto God hath turn'd thy hate:
Thou meant'st to mar the bliss he had before,
And by thy spite hast made it ten times more.'
141
"Wither's friend, William Browne, has left but one sonnet
worth repeating, and this, not for any poetical merit it pos-
sesses, but solely for its association with his once celebrated
'Britannia's Pastorals,' to the second book of which it is pre-
fixed as a dedication to that magnificent noble, William Earl of
Pembroke, of whose family the poet was a member, and who
was notable alike for his friendship with Shakespeare, his brill-
iant accomplishments, his lavish generosity to men of letters,
his splendid virtues, and his conspicuous vices. If this sonnet
is not distinguished for poetical merit, it is yet worthy of a
passing thought for its graceful commingling of modesty with
friendly panegyric:
"Not that the gift, great lord, deserves your hand,
(Held ever worth the rarest workes of men,)
Offer I this; but since in all our land
None can more rightly claim a poet's pen:
That noble blood and virtue truly known,
Which circular in you united run,
Makes you each good, and every good your own,
If it can hold in what my Muse hath done.
But weak and lowly are these tuned lays,
Yet though but weak to win fair memory,
You may improve them, and your gracing raise;
For things are priz'd as their possessors be.
If for such favour they have worthless striven,
Since love the cause was, be that love forgiven!'
142
Afternoons with the Poets.
"The poetry of George Herbert is sui generis, inasmuch as
that, although actively emotional and imaginative, it is yet ex-
clusively religious. Other English poets had written original
religious poetry, but no others had wholly confined themselves
to it. The origin of his choice of this peculiar walk for his
muse is interesting: When he was yet a youth, a student at
Cambridge, his devout spirit was shocked by the sensuality of
the poetry of his day. Even when it was not openly sensual
or impious, it seemed to him to be supersensuous, or at least
was silent for Fletcher and Wither were as yet little known,
and Milton had not sounded his mighty clarion-on all that
involved personal piety, the reciprocal relations of God and
man, and the great historic facts of revelation. Not only was
poetry completely secularized, it was almost monopolized to
celebrate the charms of voluptuous or lascivious beauty, the
pretended pangs and fears, the real hopes and desires, and the
imaginary racking tortures or ecstatic bliss of sexual love.
The woman of the poet's idolatry was then too commonly a
complaisant Venus, whom he worshipped with real or affected,
but always extravagant zeal, and with a latitude of expression
that would have brought a blush to the cheek of even the Pa-
phian goddess herself. Passionate desire and unbridled lust
breathed, with a few noble exceptions, in all their verse; and
their descriptions, when not absolutely licentious, were too of-
ten provocative of immodest and impure thoughts. This mo-
nopoly of song in the service of voluptuousness stirred the
holy indignation of the pure-minded youth; and under its in-
fluence he sent to his mother, as a 'New-year's gift,' two son-
nets, together with a letter, in which he bewailed the fact that
so few poems are writ that look towards God and heaven,'
and announced the resolution that his 'poor abilities shall be
George Herbert.
143
all and ever consecrated to God's glory.' And thenceforward
this was the motive that inspired all his verse; throughout his
brief and beautiful life he inflexibly adhered to his youthful de-
termination, and literally 'consecrated' his poetic genius to the
service of God and the advancement of religion. His poetry,
which is always intensely earnest, glows with a rapture of love
and worship. Everywhere instinct with love to man, and ab-
solutely free from every trace of metaphysical speculation and
of harsh or denunciatory dogma, the love and the glory of God
are his constant and absorbing theme. His song now mounts
on the wings of prayer, and now humbly sinks to the lowest
depths of penitent confession; now bewails his sins and frail-
ties and weaknesses with contrite sighs and groans, and now
soars like the lark to the very gates of Heaven with bursts of
rapt and exultant adoration; now lies prone at the foot of the
Cross, weeping bitter tears over the sufferings of the Crucified,
and now rises triumphant from the Mount with his ascending
Lord. Of his style and poetic merit, Coleridge has said, with
his usual finely discriminative taste, 'Having mentioned the
name of Herbert, that model of a man, a gentleman, and a
clergyman, let me add that the quaintness of some of his
thoughts, not of his diction-than which nothing can be more
pure, manly, and unaffected-has blinded modern readers to the
great general merit of his poems, which are for the most part
exquisite in their kind;' and again, when speaking of the nat-
ural or familiar and unstudied style of poetical composition,
he says: 'Another exquisite master of this species of style,
where the scholar and the poet supplies the material, but the
perfect, well-bred gentleman the expressions and the arrange-
ment, is George Herbert.' Herbert's sonnets are more correct
in their structure than those of his contemporaries generally;
*
10
144
Afternoons with the Poets.
and, while sharing the peculiar features of his other poems,
they are exceptionally remarkable for the brief and pithy co-
piousness of their meaning-or, their 'meatiness,' as an edito-
rial friend is wont to say when he is at a loss for a word to
describe the pregnant fulness of some literary wares. In this
respect, I know of few poets who compare with Herbert. The
sonnet that I shall first repeat is not presented as an exponent
of his style, so much as for the interest attaching to it as being
the one he sent his mother as a New-year's gift, and embody-
ing the resolution which gave the bent to all his subsequent
poetical writings. It is also interesting as being the earliest of
all his poems:
"My God, where is that ancient heat towards Thee,
Wherewith whole shoals of martyrs once did burn,
Besides their other flames? Doth Poetry
Wear Venus' livery? only serve her turn?
Why are not sonnets made of Thee? and lays
Upon thine altar burnt? Cannot thy love
Heighten a spirit to sound out Thy praise
As well as any she? Cannot thy dove
Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight?
Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same,
Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name?
Why doth that fire, which by thy power and might
Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose
Than that, which one day, worms may chance refuse?'
Herbert's other sonnets are dispersed at intervals over his col-
lection of sacred poems, 'The Temple.' All of them are mark-
ed by the 'quaintness' spoken of by Coleridge; and they are
marred by a faulty method of punctuation, the peculiarity of
which is a redundance of semicolons, that impart a staccato-like
style of articulation to his lines. His sonnet on 'Prayer,' to-
Sonnets by Herbert.
145
gether with many beauties, has an excess of his characteristic
defects of manner. There is scarcely another poem in the lan-
guage which has so many thoughts so compactly packed in so
few lines, or such an opulence of illustrative similes:
'Prayer—the Church's banquet; angels' age;
God's breath in man returning to his birth;
The soul in paraphrase; heart in pilgrimage;
The Christian plummet, sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against th' Almighty; sinner's tower;
Reversed thunder; Christ's side-piercing spear;
The six-days world-transposing in an hour;
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss;
Exalted manna; gladness of the best;
Heaven in ordinary; man well drest;
The milky way; the bird of paradise;
Church bells beyond the stars heard; the soul's blood;
The land of spices; something understood.'
There are two of his sonnets in which he contrasts 'Immortal
Love,' the author of all, with the mortal and lustful love sung
by the poets, and which have some noble thoughts set in really
exquisite lines. Passing these by with this brief allusion, I
shall ask you to linger for a moment over two others on 'The
Holy Scriptures:"
"O Book! Infinite sweetness! let my heart
Suck every letter; and a honey gain,
Precious for any grief in any part,
To clear the breast, to mollify all pain.
Thou art all health; health thriving till it make
A full eternity. Thou art a mass
Of strange delights, where we may wish and take.
Ladies, look here: this is the thankful glass
146
Afternoons with the Poets.
That mends the looker's eyes: this is the well
That washes what it shews. Who can endear
Thy praise too much? Thou art Heaven's lieger here,
Working against the states of Death and Hell.
Thou art joy's handsel. Heaven lies flat in thee,
Subject to every mounter's bended knee.'
"Oh, that I knew how all thy lights combine,
And the configurations of their glory!
Seeing not only how each verse doth shine,
But all the constellations of the story.
This verse marks that, and both do make a motion
Unto a third that ten leaves off doth lie.
Then, as dispersed herbs do make a potion,
These three make up some Christian's destiny.
Such are thy secrets; which my life makes good,
And comments on thee. For in every thing
Thy words do find me out, and parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.
Stars are poor books, and oftentimes do miss :
This book of stars lights to eternal bliss.'
I shall only quote one other of Herbert's sonnets, that on the
'Bosom Sin,' of which Coleridge has said that it is equally ad-
mirable for the weight, number, and expression of the thoughts,
and for the simple dignity of the language; unless, indeed, a
fastidious taste should object to the latter half of the sixth
line:
“Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us; then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,
Pulpits and Sundays; sorrow dogging sin;
Afflictions sorted; anguish of all sizes;
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in;
Bibles laid open; millions of surprises;
Transitional Period of English Poetry.
Blessings beforehand; ties of gratefulness;
The sound of glory ringing in our ears;
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace; eternal hopes and fears.
Yet all these fences, and their whole array,
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.'
147
"Queen Elizabeth died in 1603; and two years later (1605)
witnessed the birth of William Habington, Sir William Dave-
nant (by some reputed the natural son of Shakespeare), and
Edmund Waller; three poets belonging to different schools of
the transitional period of English poetry which now ensued,
and whose poems illustrate in a sufficiently definite manner the
divergence between the models of the age of Elizabeth and
James, and those of the time of the first and second Charles.
The transition referred to was slow and almost imperceptible;
for the illustrious poets who made the reign of the Virgin
Queen glorious remained, for the most part, as a legacy to
James for a considerable portion of his life, and when they de-
parted their mantle was worn by men of inferior but indubi-
table genius, who maintained more or less capably the lofty
standard of the Elizabethan poets during James's reign. But
when the new school of poetry at last prevailed, which had its
rise in the polite but disturbed reign of Charles the First, and
reached its climax under his dissolute and frivolous son, the
grandest of the greater poets had either passed away, or were
no longer in the prime of their vigor and influence. It is true
Ben Jonson, Chapman, Ford, and Massinger, and a few others
of lesser note, survived James, and carried a strong but waning
influence over into the reign of the first Charles-Ford and
Massinger for fourteen, Jonson for twelve, and Chapman for
nine years. But with the exception of these and Sir John
148
*Afternoons with the Poets.
Davies, who survived James only one year, and Donne and
Drayton, who lived till five years later, all the most illustrious
poets of the Elizabethan era, which properly includes most of
the years of James, had gone over to the majority. Sidney,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Daniel, and Beaumont were long dead;
Marlowe and Fletcher died in the same year with James; and
their survivors, though led by Jonson and Chapman, were not
only impotent to exert a restraining or even a corrective influ-
ence upon the new and rising school, but it is plainly manifest
from many of their later productions that they themselves be-
came infected by the meretricious poetical taste that ruled the
hour, and were injuriously affected by it. They lost in man-
liness and dignity as well as in originality and power, when
they entered into the lists with their youthful rivals, and at-
tempted to beat them with their own weapons. Their studied
wit was even more artificial than that of their competitors;
their sentimentality, though equally clever and ingenious, was
just as palpably the merest superficial veneering; and their
affectation of nonchalant ease, jaunty grace, smart emptiness,
and elegant frivolity, was a ludicrous failure. The competition
debased and effeminated the style of the elder poets without
imparting tone or elevation to that of the younger. Of the
three poets whom I have mentioned as belonging to opposite
schools in this transitional period, Habington and Davenant
remained comparatively true to the purer and more vigorous
models of the vanishing age, and Waller was one of the most
eminent, as he was also one of the most brilliant and elegant
of the school that supplanted them. Of Davenant I shall have
no more to say, since, as he wrote no sonnets, an estimate and
analysis of his productions are not strictly pertinent to our
present inquiry. But Habington (1605-1645) was one of the
:
Habington's "Castara.”
149
most prolific of our sonnet writers; and so great is their mer-
it, it is remarkable they are so little known and appreciated.
Simple, manly, and elevated in sentiment; pure and sincere in
feeling; graceful and yet vigorous in expression; free from
extravagant hyperbole, and unbedizened by the pinchbeck or-
naments of pedantry and conceit, their versification is elegant,
and they are imbued with unaffected tenderness and moral
dignity. The best known of Habington's poems is a collec-
tion, in three parts, which he entitled 'Castara,' in honor of the
excellent and well-born lady whom he won in marriage. In
the first part, under the caption 'A Mistress,' he celebrates his
courtship of this lady in a number of short and spirited com-
positions in various forms, of which twenty-three are sonnets.
The second part is in two subdivisions, one being entitled 'A
Wife,' and the other 'A Friend.' The first consists of thirty-
one sonnets to 'Castara now Possest of in Marriage,' together
with twenty-six other brief poems-elegiac, epistolary, ama-
tory, and descriptive—but all of them, whatever their form or
to whomsoever addressed, containing allusions to 'Castara,' or
converging upon her virtues and excellences. The second sub-
division is in an altogether different key, being made up of
seven elegies wrung from the poet by the death of his 'best
friend and kinsman, George Talbot,' and containing not even
the slightest allusion to 'Castara,' either as mistress or wife:
the poet evidently feeling that amatory or sentimental allusions
were out of place in elegiac compositions. The third part of
the collection, entitled 'A Man,' is entirely made up of re-
ligious poetry in the form of free paraphrases of portions of
the writings of David, Job, Isaiah, and St. Paul; some of them
being exceedingly vigorous and striking, and all of conspicuous
intensity and earnestness. While Habington is often intense,
150
Afternoons with the Poets.
he is never impassioned. His habitual moderation and self-
control and his severe taste conspire to restrain his muse from
displays of passion; but his sensibility is so quick, and his ele-
vation of thought so constant, as to partially supply that depth
of feeling which he was too cold to possess and too honest to
feign. I should like to give extended examples of his sonnets,
so as to exhibit all his various styles from the chastely frigid
to the virtuously warm, but shall confine myself to six address-
ed to 'Castara ' three before their marriage, and as many
more after she became his wife. The first of the courtship
trio is to 'Castara Praying:'
"I saw Castara pray, and from the skie
A winged legion of bright angels flie
To catch her vows, for fear her virgin prayer
Might chance to mingle with impurer air.
To vulgar eyes, the sacred truth I write,
May seem a fancy. But the eagle's sight
Of saints and poets, miracles oft view,
Which to dull heretics appear untrue.
Fair zeal begets such wonders. O divine
And purest beauty, let me thee enshrine
In my devoted soul, and from thy praise,
T'enrich my garland, pluck religious bayes.
Shine thou the star by which my thoughts shall move,
Best subject of my pen, queen of my love.'
The second of this group, 'A Vow,' is specially worthy of at-
tention for the flowing beauty and delicate fancy of the first
four lines and the last line:
"By those chaste lamps which yield a silent light,
To the cold urnes of virgins; by that night,
Which guilty of no crime, doth only hear
The vows of recluse nuns and th' anthrït's prayer;
Sonnets by Habington.
And by thy chaster self; my fervent zeal
Like mountain ice, which the north winds congeale,
To purest christall, feels no wanton fire:
But as the humble pilgrim (whose desire
Blest in Christ's cottage view by angel's hands
Transported from sad Bethlem) wondring stands
At the great miracle; so I at thee
Whose beauty is the shrine of chastity.
Thus my bright Muse in a new orb shall move,
And even teach religion how to love.'
151
The third complains, in a vein of graceful hyperbole through-
out, and with genuine poetic feeling in the first half, of the ab-
sence of his mistress in the country:
"The lesser people of the air conspire
To keep thee from me.
Philomel with higher
And sweeter notes, woos thee to weep her rape,
Which would appease the gods, and change her shape.
The early lark, preferring 'fore soft rest
Obsequious duty, leaves his downy nest,
And doth to thee harmonious tribute pay;
Expecting from thy eyes the break of day.
From which the owl is frighted, and doth rave
(As never having felt the warmth of love)
In uncouth vaults, and the chill shades of night,
Not biding the bright lustre of thy sight.
With him my fate agrees. Not viewing thee
I'm lost in mists: at best, but meteors see.'
The three sonnets addressed to 'Castara' after he 'was possest
of her in marriage' are severally, 'Against Opinion,” ‘Of the
Knowledge of Love,' and 'To a Tombe.' Each has lines of
exquisite sweetness, and the ideas in the one last named bear
a great resemblance to those in Sir Walter Raleigh's invocation
152
Afternoons with the Poets.
to death, which you quoted. I present them in the order
named without comment:
"Why should we build, Castara, in the air
Of frail Opinion? Why admire as fair,
What the weak faith of man give us for right?
The jugling world cheats but the weaker sight.
What is in greatness happy? As free mirth,
As ample pleasures of th' indulgent Earth,
We joy who on the ground our mansion find,
As they, who sail like witches in the wind
Of court applause. What can their powerful spell
Over enchanted man more than compel
Him into various forms? Nor serves their charme
Themselves to good, but to work others harme.
Tyrant Opinion but depose; and we
Will absolute in th' happiest empire be.'
"Where sleeps the north-wind when the south inspires
Life in the spring, and gathers into quires
The scatter'd nightingales; whose subtle ears
Heard first th' harmonious language of the spheres;
Whence hath the stone, magnetic force t' allure
Th' enamour'd iron; from a seed impure
Or natural did first the mandrake grow;
What power i' th' ocean makes it ebb and flow;
What strange materials is the azure sky
Compacted of; of what its brightest eye
The ever-flaming Sun; what people are
In th' unknown world; what worlds in every star;
Let envious fancies at this secret rove;
Castara, what we know we'll practice, love.'
"Tyrant o'er tyrants, thou who only dost
Clip the lascivious beauty without lust:
1
Edmund Waller.
What horrour at thy sight shoots thro' each sense!
How powerful is thy silent eloquence,
Which never flatters! Thou instruct'st the proud
That their swoln pomp is but an empty cloud,
Slave to each wind. The fair, those flowers they have
Fresh in their cheek, are strew'd upon a grave.
Thou tell'st the rich, their idol is but earth.
The vainly pleas'd, that syren-like their mirth
Betrays to mischief, and that only he
Dares welcome death, whose aims at virtue be.
Which yet more zeal doth to Castara move,
What checks me, when the tomb persuades to love?'
153
"The sonnets of Edmund Waller (1605-1687), of which
there are really but two, the others being merely octosyllabic
couplets of fourteen lines, are far below the reputation of the
poet, or the actual merit of his other poetry, though they have
its distinguishing characteristics. One of them is an elegant
trifle, suggested by seeing a tree that had been cut in paper by
a lady whom he admired after his fickle fashion; and the oth-
er, 'Upon our late loss of the Duke of Cambridge,' is a polite
mingling of elegy for the dead with compliments for the liv-
ing, in which the compliment outweighs the elegy-—both being
utterly empty of anything having the semblance of heartfelt
sympathy or downright sincerity. Judge for yourself :
"Fair hand! that can on virgin-paper write,
Yet from the stain of ink preserve it white:
Whose travel o'er that silver field doth show
Like tracks of leverets in morning snow.
Love's image thus in purest minds is wrought,
Without a spot or blemish to the thought.
Strange that your fingers should the pencil foil,
Without the help of colours or of oil!
i
154
Afternoons with the Poets.
For tho' a painter boughs and leaves can make,
'Tis you alone can make them bend and shake;
Whose breath salutes your new-created grove,
Like southern winds, and makes it gently move.
Orpheus could make the forest dance, but you
Can make the motion and the forest too.'
"The failing blossoms which a young plant bears,
Engage our hope for the succeeding years;
And hope is all which Art or Nature brings,
At the first trial, to accomplish things.
Mankind was first created an essay;
That ruder draught the deluge wash'd away.
How many ages pass'd, what blood and toil,
Before we made one Kingdom of this isle!
How long in vain had Nature striv'd to frame
A perfect princess ere her Highness came!
For joys so great we must with patience wait;
'Tis the set price of happiness complete.
As a first-fruit Heav'n claim'd that lovely boy;
The next shall live and be the nation's joy!'
B
1
!
1
1
Fifth Afternoon.
:
V.
WHEN we met on the following afternoon, it very soon be-
came apparent that the Professor had resolved to act up to
Herrick's admonition "to the Virgins to make much of Time;"
for roaring out the poet's famous verse as he flung himself on
the green sod-
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower, that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying".
he puffed vigorously at his meerschaum till he had enveloped
himself in a cloud of smoke, and then resumed with the query:
My boy, do you remember the safety-valve contrived by Don
Quixote for Sancho when the latter was disposed to talk loud-
ly and long, after he had been cudgelled by a rabble whom
he had outdone in their sole accomplishment of braying like
asses ?"
"I remember Sancho's cudgelling," I replied, "but have no
recollection of Don Quixote's safety-valve."
"Cervantes
"I will refresh your memory, then," he said.
tells us that when the rabble beset honest Sancho, and began
to bang and bruise him to their hearts' content, the valorous
Don Quixote prudently took himself out of harm's way. Af-
terward, on being reproached by Sancho for having fled like a
coward and abandoned him to his fate, the good Knight ex-
plained that he had indeed retired, but that he had not fled;
158
Afternoons with the Poets.
that a retreat is not to be accounted a flight, that courage
which has not wisdom for its guide is only temerity, and that
in such a retreat he did but imitate many valiant men, who,
not to hazard their persons indiscreetly, reserved themselves
for a more fortunate hour. He then helped the unconvinced
squire on his ass, and the twain sought the shelter of a poplar
grove about a quarter of a league distant. While they were
on their way thither, Sancho made the air resound with lam-
entable sighs and groans, whereupon the Knight asked him
why he made such a heavy moan? Sancho replied that, from
his rump to his poll, he felt such grievous pains that he was
ready to sink. Then said the Don, 'Without doubt, the in-
tenseness of thy torments is by reason the staff with which
thou wert struck was broad and long, and so, having fallen on
those parts of thy back, caused a contusion there, and affects
them all with pain; and had it been of greater magnitude, thy
grievances had been so much the greater.' This sort of con-
solation was too much for Sancho's equanimity, grieved as he
was in mind and suffering in body, and he turned savagely on
his master, berating him with such a tempest of reproaches as
to completely stagger the Knight, who, however, wisely bent
to the storm till Sancho had spent his breath. By that time
Don Quixote had recovered his presence of mind, and had
found leisure to devise the ingenious safety-valve that has es-
caped your notice. 'I durst lay a wager,' he said to Sancho,
'that, now thou art suffered to prate without interruption, thou
feelest no manner of pain in thy whole body. Pr'ythee talk
on, my child; say anything that comes uppermost to thy mouth
or is burdensome to thy brain; so it but alleviates thy pain,
thy impertinences will rather please than offend me.""
"There was a grim touch of humor, Professor," I said, "and,
Scolding as a Panacea.
159
as I can testify from my observation of the case of an old
friend of mine, a deal of shrewd common-sense also, in the
Knight's device. Whenever my friend-who is rather testy,
and a victim to the gout-is suffering excruciatingly from an
access of his disease, he derives such unmistakable comfort,
and experiences so great an alleviation of his torment, when he
indulges in unstinted scoldings of all who come near him, that
his family dutifully put themselves in the way of his vitupera-
tions and endure them with cheerful satisfaction. They would
as soon think of complaining of his colchicum as of his bitter
invectives."
"I am glad," he responded, "that the knight's safety-valve
meets your approval; but you seem unconscious that I have
been testing its efficacy on yourself during these conversations.
You look incredulous, but nevertheless it is true. Don't you
perceive that whenever I have found you growing restive under
my long preachments, I have encouraged you, as the Knight
of the Woful Countenance did his Squire, to relieve yourself
by saying whatever came uppermost to thy mouth or was bur-
densome to thy brain, knowing it would alleviate thy impa-
tience as it did Sancho's pain ?"
What a sly old Joe Bagstock you are, Professor!" I ex-
claimed; "but go on, for I know there must be some exquisite
moral behind all this."
'Your penetration is not at fault, my lad. Without further
beating the bush then, as I have a deal to say that must be
left unsaid unless you allow me to do all the talking, I want
you to consent to dispense with the safety-valve for awhile."
"All right, Professor," I replied; "go on with your mono-
logue, and I will lie here on the soft grass, like Keats's 'gray-
haired Saturn, quiet as a stone."
ļ
11
160
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Let us resume, then, where we left off in our last conver-
sation. The enervating literary atmosphere of the reigns of
the first and second Charles steadily grew more and more un-
friendly to poetry, especially so to the sonnet; and having first
dwindled into a weakly plant, it finally almost entirely disap-
peared. Of the six eminent poets who flourished contempo-
raneously with Waller-John Milton (1608-1674), Sir John
Suckling (1609–1641), Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), Andrew
Marvell (1620–1678), and John Dryden (1631–1700)—not one
save the first named wrote a single sonnet. It was reserved
for the grand puritan spirit of Cromwell's protectorate, in the
person of Milton, to infuse a new life and vigor into poetry,
and to direct it to nobler and grander flights. And although
for nearly half a century his voice was as solitary as that of
one crying in the wilderness, it was yet a truly inspired voice;
and along with all other forms of poesy, the neglected sonnet
felt the impulse of his mighty genius. Milton's sonnets are
few but grand, notwithstanding that Dr. Johnson, misled by
inveterate prejudice and blinded by a poetical strabismus, pro-
nounced them undeserving of any particular criticism,' and
asserted that of the best of them it can only be said that they
are not bad.' Wordsworth's verdict was a worthier one when
he said of the sonnet that in Milton's hand,
6
'The Thing became a Trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains.'
Milton wrote a few more than a score of sonnets, which were
composed at different periods of his life: two or three in the
brightness of his early youth, more than half a score at intervals
in his richly endowed manhood, and three when blindness had
converted his later years into a lengthened twilight most deso
John Milton.
161
late and most majestic. Among those written in the second
of these periods are several, three in particular, which exhibit
many of the distinctive qualities of his greatest poem―its
grace, power, luminous distinctness, and undeviating directness,
its blended sweetness and strength, and its lofty grandeur of
expression. The first of these is noticeable for the correctness
of its structure, an excellence which distinguishes nearly all of
Milton's sonnets; for its apt and graceful classical allusions;
and especially for its modest though calmly confident assertion
of the 'eternizing' properties of his verse, affording one of the
rare instances of self-assertion to be found in his poems. This
sonnet was written, as he himself informs us in its caption,
'When the Assault was Intended on the City,' and is an ap-
peal to military commanders for the safety of his house :
'Captain, or colonel, or knight in arms,
Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,
If deed of honour did thee ever please,
Guard them, and him within protect from harms.
He can requite thee; for he knows the charms
That call fame on such gentle acts as these,
And he can spread thy name o'er lands and seas,
Whatever clime the sun's bright circle warms.
Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower:
The great Emathian conqueror did spare
The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground; and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poets had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.'
The second, ascribed 'To the Lord General Cromwell,' is a
hearty eulogy on that great man, in which, under cover of ap-
plauding his stern career as a military chieftain, he frankly re-
minds him of his equally stern duties as a civil ruler. You
'
162
Afternoons with the Poets.
will recognize old and pleasant acquaintances in several of its
lines:
"Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud,
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast ploughed,
And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast reared God's trophies, and his work pursued,
While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,
And Worcester's laureat wreath. Yet much remains
To conquer still; peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war; new foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw.'
The third of these sonnets, 'On the Late Massacre in Piemont,'
recalls the style of the Lesser Prophets, which it rivals in the
magnificence of its imprecations. Like them, it burns with
holy wrath and unforgiving zeal. It pulsates vehemently with
the old Hebrew spirit of retributive vindictiveness, and its ap-
peals for vengeance are unsoftened by any touch of mercy or
forgiveness. Its opening line is an example of concentrated
just wrath, such as is rarely met with outside the Old Tes-
tament Scriptures. Hearken to the angry blare of Milton's
mighty trumpet:
‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
.
Milton's Sonnets.
Slain by the bloody Piemontese that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
Their moans
To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred-fold, who, having learned thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian wo.'
163
Besides these, there are three others of Milton's sonnets which
have a special interest for the exceptional correctness of their
form, and also because they relate to his blindness, having been
written, as he tells us in one of them, when no ray of light
reached his 'idle orbs,' from 'sun, or moon, or star.' They are
doubly interesting as giving us a glimpse of his noble bearing
under the pressure of his heavy burden. Nowhere in them
does he lower himself by an indulgence in querulous repinings,
or by so much as a fretful word; nowhere does he excite,
much less invite, our pity; indeed, his attitude throughout for-
bids that, and instead we look with admiration on the venera-
ble spectacle of his 'matchless fortitude,' his unwavering faith
and patience, his serene and lofty resignation. One of these
sonnets, which is perfect in its kind, but was surlily pronounced
'poor' by Dr. Johnson, is 'On His Deceased Wife,' not his
first, but his second wife, who died in childbed within a year
after their marriage, and whom he married after he became
blind. There is a touching reference to the circumstance that
he had never seen her face, in the lines where he expresses his
confident 'trust to have full sight of her in Heaven without
restraint,' and still more poetically in the one where, describ-
ing her as she appeared to him in a vision, he says 'her face
was veil'd.' There is a vein of unusual tenderness for Milton
4
:
:
=
164
Afternoons with the Poets.
in this sonnet, but it is tenderness without any tincture of
weakness:
"Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
Rescued from death by force, tho' pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
Purification in the old Law did save,
And such, as yet once more I trust to have
Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was veil'd; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight:
But O! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
I wak'd; she fled; and day brought back my night.'
Beyond directing your attention in advance to the delightful
familiar line at the close of the next sonnet following—a line
which has been an evangel of patience and consolation to
thousands upon thousands since it was written, I shall cite
the remaining two on his blindness without any comment to
weaken their impressiveness. The first is entitled 'On His
Blindness,' and the other was addressed to his dear friend
Cyriac Skinner:
"When I consider how my life is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
Doth God exact day labour, light denied?
I fondly ask: But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
;
!
·
Milton's Letter on his Blindness.
Either man's work, or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve, who only stand and wait.'
"Cyriac, these three years' day these eyes, tho' clear,
To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light their seeing have forgot;
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun, or moon, or stars, throughout the year,
Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer
Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe rings from side to side.
This thought might lead me through the world-vain mask,
Content though blind, had I no other guide.'
165
Milton's serenity under his cruel deprivation is, further, most
impressively illustrated by a letter which he wrote, almost
coincidently with these sonnets, to Leonard Philara, a learned
Athenian, who first corresponded with and afterward visited
him in London; and who, his sympathy and concern having
been excited by the poet's blindness, desired him to detail the
causes and symptoms of the disorder, that he might lay them
before an eminent physician in Paris, who was skilled in com-
plaints of the eyes. In reply to Philara's request, Milton
wrote, describing the origin and growth of his blindness, giving
the attendant circumstances with great fulness. He had, how-
ever, no hope of a cure being effected; and, after saying to his
friend that he had made up his mind to the incurableness of
I
166
Afternoons with the Poets.
1
the malady, he concludes this exceedingly interesting letter
in the following lofty strain: 'I often reflect,' he says, 'that,
as the wise man admonishes, days of darkness are destined to
each of us, the darkness which I experience, less oppressive
than that of the tomb, is, owing to the singular goodness
of the Deity, passed amid the pursuits of literature and the
cheering salutations of friendship. But if, as is written, man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that pro-
ceedeth from the mouth of God, why may not any one ac-
quiesce in the privation of his sight, when God has so amply
furnished his mind and his conscience with eyes. While he
so tenderly provides for me, while he so graciously leads me
by the hand and conducts me on the way, I will, since it is
his pleasure, rather rejoice than repine at being blind. And,
my dear Philara, whatever may be the event, I wish you adieu
with no less courage and composure than if I had the eyes of
a lynx.'
"After Milton," continued the Professor, "there came a
long and dark night for the sonnet. Scarcely without excep-
tion, the wits and men of letters of the reigns of James the
Second, William and Mary, Anne, and the first George, were
blind to its capabilities and dumb to its invitations. Even
Addison, whose fine criticism of Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' in
the Spectator, was the earliest recognition of the merits of that
sublime poem, and the first to assign it and its author the ex-
alted place they have since maintained, was mute with refer-
ence to Milton's sonnets; and neither he, nor any of his dis-
tinguished literary compeers-Prior, Swift, Wycherley, Con-
greve, Farquhar, or Pope-contributed a sonnet to our litera-
ture. Nor did the sonnet suffer alone. All other poetry was
made to descend from the altitudes where Milton had carried
ན
Poetical School of Addison and Pope.
167
it into a less friendly atmosphere, where it was forced to do
duty to parties in Church or State, in the form of poems,
satires, fables, translations, epistles, and essays moral and phil-
osophical, whose prevailing tone was extravagant eulogy or
equally extravagant detraction. In these compositions the
higher poesy played a subordinate or a constrained part; and
the most of them were tame when they were not bitter, flatu-
lent when they attempted to be sublime, and insipid when they
affected to be divinely inspired. One of Shakespeare's plays
could be less easily spared than the whole brood of them. It
was also the age of pamphlets, broadsides, gazettes, lampoons
in prose and verse, and of brilliant but unclean dramas, on
which men of genius expended their time and ingenuity and
exhausted their energies, to the exclusion of a devotion to the
loftier pursuits of literature. It is not to be denied that some
real gems in their kind were produced by the workers of this
promiscuous mine, but they were neither numerous nor of the
first water; so that, as far as the higher forms of poetry are
concerned, the age which has been called the 'Augustan age'
of English literature has little to show to justify the title. It
produced no great poem to compare with those by Spenser, or
Shakespeare, or Milton; and its chief merit is to be found in
the facts that its greatest poets belonged to the first rank of
those whom we call minor poets, and that it was liberal of
patronage, and freely awarded political distinction and influence
to its men of letters.
"When, a few moments ago, I placed Pope among those who
had contributed no sonnets to our literature, I was not unmind-
ful that he wrote several fourteen-line poems which have much
of the compactness and unity of idea which distinguish the
sonnet; but this is their only claim to rank as such, and Pope
168
Afternoons with the Poets.
was too consummate an artist to prefer it for them. One of
these, 'On a Fan,' is set forth by him as an imitation of Wal-
ler's manner; another is an epitaph on Charles Earl of Dorset;
and the other, which I shall quote for the associations it recalls
of several memorable British statesmen, is an Inscription' on
the poet's grotto at Twickenham, which, he tells us in a sup-
plemental caption, was 'composed of marbles, spars, gems, ores,
and minerals.' You will perceive that the couplets of which it
is constructed have the familiar pendulum-like beat that so
monotonously balances the lines in his other longer and more
ambitious performances:
"Thou who shalt stop where Thames' translucent wave
Shines a broad mirror through the shadowy cave;
Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distil,
And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill;
Unpolish'd gems no ray on pride bestow,
And latent metals innocently glow:
Approach. Great nature studiously behold!
And eye the mine without a wish for gold.
Approach but awful! lo! the Ægerian grot,
Where nobly pensive St. John sat and thought,
Where British sighs from dying Wyndham stole,
And the bright flame was shot through Marchmont's soul,
Let such, such only tread this sacred floor,
Who dare to love their country, and be poor.'
"One of the latest of this school of poets was Dr. Edward
Young (1681-1765), best known as the author of 'The Night
Thoughts.' This respectable poet and moralist trod in the
footsteps of Pope, though at a respectful distance, as became
his more moderate abilities; and, like Pope, he more seldom
subsidized his muse to political uses than the other poets of
his period, though it must be conceded that he outdid them all
Dr. Young.
169
in flattery. He was born before Pope, and outlived him and
the sets which revolved around him and Addison; and is a
sort of connecting link between the literature that was then
westering to its setting, and that which was just beginning to
'flatter the mountain - tops' with its approaching dawn. He
also wrote very few true sonnets; and the following, which is
repellent by its brutality, is an example of them, such as they
are. The subject was suggested, as he himself takes pains to
tell us, by 'that famous piece of the Crucifixion, done by Mi-
chael Angelo, who obtained leave to treat a malefactor, con-
demned to be broke upon the wheel, as he pleased for this pur-
pose. The man being extended, this wonderful artist directed
that he should be stabbed in such parts of the body as he ap-
prehended would occasion the most excruciating pains, that he
might represent the agonies of death in the most natural man-
ner.' In these lines the deliberate and cold-blooded cruelty
attributed to the great artist is varnished over by a gloss of in-
effectual praise, and the atrocious butchery of his apocryphal
act is sought to be rendered commendable, on the principle
that the end sanctifies the means. I have never been able to
read it without a shudder of disgust. Let us see if it fares
any better with you:
"While his Redeemer on his canvas dies,
Stabbed at his feet his brother weltering lies;
The daring artist, cruelly serene,
Views the pale cheek, and the distorted mien;
He drains off life by drops, and, deaf to cries,
Examines every spirit as it flies:
He studies torment; dives in mortal wo;
To rouse up every pang, repeats his blow;
Each rising agony, each dreadful grace,
Yet warm, transplanting to his Saviour's face.
170
Afternoons with the Poets.
O glorious theft! O nobly wicked draught!
With its full charge of death each feature fraught!
Such wondrous force the magic colours boast,
From his own skill he starts in horror lost."
"The poets of the new era may be distinguished from these
vanishing favorites of a vanishing taste and age by their more
genuine and abundant poetical gifts and graces, and by their
avoidance of the studiously polished artificiality which had
been so sedulously cultivated by the skilful artists of the elder
school. Rejecting also the trick of sharp sallies of wit and
pungent thrusts of satire, which, with didactic moralizings, com-
mon-sense apothegms, and ethical or philosophical reasonings,
had won the popular admiration and passed current for poetry
with their immediate predecessors, they studied man and nat-
ure more attentively than the others had done, at the same
time not neglecting the embellishments of art; and as a result
the forms of beauty which they produced were more varied,
more pleasing, and more elaborate, and have proved more dur-
able. Perhaps no more striking evidence could be adduced
of the superiority of the new poets over the old—and when I
say old, I refer to those of Queen Anne's reign-than is to be
found in the circumstance that, while the former afford copi-
ous invitations and welcome opportunities to the pencil of the
painter and the burin of the engraver, the latter are compara-
tively sterile of pictorial suggestions. Indeed, so remarkable
was this sterility that it extorted from Wordsworth the severe
but just censure that, excepting the nocturnal reverie of Lady
Winchelsea, and a passage or two in the 'Windsor Forest' of
Pope, the poetry of the period intervening between the publi-
cation of the 'Paradise Lost' and the 'Seasons' [of Thomson,
which Wordsworth elsewhere pronounces a work of inspira-
(
!
Poets of the New Era.
171
tion] does not contain a single new image of external nature,
and scarcely presents a familiar one from which it can be in-
ferred that the eye of the Poet had been steadily fixed upon
his object, much less that his feelings had urged him to work
upon it in the spirit of genuine imagination.'
"Among these new poets were Richard Savage (1698–1743),
David Mallet (1700-1765), James Thomson (1700-1748),
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), William Collins (1720-1756),
Thomas Warton (1728-1790), William Cowper (1731-1800),
and Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774). They were men of wide-
ly different grades of genius, were separated by considerable
intervals of time, and revolved in different social and other as-
sociations and companionships. Their choice of subjects and
poetical methods, therefore, was not dictated by concert, but
arose from the purer taste and larger poetic sensibility of each
individual. Several of their number, notably Thomson, Gray,
Collins, and Goldsmith, infinitely excelled the poets of the
school of Addison and Pope in every lofty and picturesque
poetical attribute. Nowhere in the works of the latter do we
find such a wealth of description, and such vividness and truth-
fulness of coloring, as meet us at every turn in the poems of
Thomson and Goldsmith, and less lavishly but in great perfec-
tion in some of Gray's; they completely lack the fine outbursts
and masterly delineations of passion, the daring or pleasing
flights of imagination, and the rich lyrical harmonies of Gray
and Collins; and they are conspicuously deficient in the elegant
simplicity, the genial wisdom, the lambent humor, the melting
tenderness, the perennial cheerfulness, and the fresh and un-
cloying sweetness, which charm us in every line of Goldsmith.
-All of this group of poets are above mediocrity-Warton
being the least original and impassioned, though he is not sur-
172
Afternoons with the Poets.
passed by any of them in taste and elegance. But notwith-
standing the variety and excellence of many of their poetical
productions, they have left us very few sonnets: Savage, Mal-
let, Thomson, Collins, and Goldsmith wrote none; Gray only
one; Cowper some seven or eight, which were the fruits
of his old age, nearly all having been composed after he had
reached threescore; and Warton more than all the others com-
bined.
"A sonnet of Gray's, which I shall repeat presently, had the
unusual honor of a critical analysis and estimate, more close,
perhaps, than has ever been accorded to any other poem of
equal brevity, by two poets of transcendent genius and exact-
ing taste. The poets I refer to were Wordsworth and Cole-
ridge; and the sonnet is one that was wrung from Gray when
he was only twenty-six years old—which circumstance, I imag-
ine, was not considered by either of his distinguished critics—
by the death of the best beloved of all his friends, Richard
West, a young gentleman of great amiability and accomplish-
ments, with whom he had been at school at Eton, and to whom
many of his charming letters are addressed. Under the influ-
ence of his fresh grief the young poet poured out his heart
as follows:
"In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,
And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire:
The birds in vain their amorous descant join,
Or cheerful fields resume their green attire;
These ears, alas! for other notes repine:
A different object do these eyes require ;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire;
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer,
And new-born pleasure brings to happier men;
Wordsworth on Gray's Sonnet.
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear;
To warm their little loves the birds complain.
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear;
And weep the more because I weep in vain.'
173
Wordsworth selected this solitary use of the sonnet by Gray
to illustrate his favorite theory 'that not only the language of
a large portion of every good poem, even of the most elevated
character, must necessarily, except with reference to the metre,
in no respect differ from that of good prose, but likewise that
some of the most interesting parts of the best poems will be
found to be strictly the language of prose, when prose is well
written.' After prefacing his quotation of this sonnet by the
observation that Gray 'was at the head of those who by their
reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation be-
tween prose and metrical compositions, and was more than any
other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own po-
etic diction,' Wordsworth criticises it by saying, 'It will easily
be perceived that the only part of this sonnet which is of any
value is the lines printed in italics; it is equally obvious that,
except in the rhyme, and in the use of the single word "fruit-
less" for fruitlessly, which is so far a defect, the language of
these lines does in no respect differ from that of a prose.' In
a criticism of Wordsworth's 'Lyrical Ballads,' which is replete
with delicate and high praise of the genius of their author,
Coleridge oppugns the above theory of his friend and brother
poet; and in the course of an exceedingly acute and instructive
argument against its tenability, he effectually disposes of some
of the generalizations of Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's son-
net. Though it will consume more time than we can conven-
iently afford, I will repeat this criticism of a criticism without
curtailment. 'In Mr. Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's sonnet,'
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Afternoons with the Poets.
says Coleridge, 'the reader's sympathy with his praise or blame
of the different parts is taken for granted rather perhaps too
easily. He has not, at least, attempted to win or compel it by
argumentative analysis. In my conception, at least, the lines
rejected as of no value do, with the exception of the two first,
differ as much and as little from the language of common life,
as those which he has printed in italics as possessing genuine
excellence. Of the five lines thus honorably distinguished, two
of them differ from prose even more widely than the lines
which either precede or follow, in the position of the words:
""A different object do these eyes require;
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine,
And in my breast the imperfect joys expire."
But were it otherwise, what would this prove, but a truth, of
which no man ever doubted? videlicet, that there are sentences
which would be equally in their place both in verse and prose.
Assuredly it does not prove the point, which alone requires
proof; namely, that there are not passages which would suit
the one and not suit the other. The first line of this sonnet is
distinguished from the ordinary language of men by the epi-
thet to morning. For we will set aside, at present, the consid-
eration that the particular word "smiling" is hackneyed, and,
as it involves a sort of personification, not quite congruous with
the common and material attribute of "shining." And, doubt-
less, this adjunction of epithets for the purpose of additional
description, where no particular attention is demanded for the
quality of the thing, would be noticed as giving a poetic cast
to a man's conversation. Should the sportsman exclaim,
"Come, boys! the rosy morning calls you up;" he will be sup-
posed to have some song in his head. But no one suspects
Coleridge on Gray's Sonnet.
175
this when he says, "A wet morning shall not confine us to
our beds." This, then, is either a defect in poetry, or it is not.
Whoever should decide in the affirmative, I would request him
to re-peruse any one poem, of any confessedly great poet from
Homer to Milton, or from Æschylus to Shakespeare; and to
strike out (in thought, I mean) every instance of this kind. If
the number of these fancied erasures did not startle him, or
if he continued to deem the work improved by their total
omission, he must advance reasons of no ordinary strength
and evidence, reasons grounded in the essence of human nature.
Otherwise I should not hesitate to consider him as a man not
so much proof against all authority, as dead to it.
The sec-
ond line,
""And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire,"
has, indeed, almost as many faults as words. But, then, it is
a bad line, not because the language is distinct from that of
prose, but because it conveys incongruous images; because it
confounds the cause and effect, the real thing with the personi-
fied representative of the thing; in short, because it differs
from the language of good-sense! That the "Phoebus" is
hackneyed, and a school-boy image, is an accidental fault, de-
pendent on the age in which the author wrote, and not deduced
from the nature of the thing. That it is part of an exploded
mythology, is an objection more deeply grounded. Yet when
the torch of ancient learning was rekindled, so cheering were
its beams, that our eldest poets, cut off by Christianity from
all accredited machinery, and deprived of all acknowledged
guardians and symbols of the great objects of nature, were
naturally induced to adopt, as a poetic language, those fabulous
personages, those forms of the supernatural in nature, which
12
176
Afternoons with the Poets.
had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great
masters. Nay, even at this day, what scholar of genial taste
will not so far sympathize with them as to read with pleasure
in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps con-
demn as puerile in a modern poet?'
"The only poets of the period under review whose sonnets.
remain to be noticed are Cowper and Thomas Warton. Cow-
per's, as I have already said, were the fruit of his advanced age.
They never rise to the highest excellence, neither do they fall
much below the level of his average compositions. If they
embalm no superb thoughts, of which it can be said, as of Her-
rick's fly in amber:
"The urn was little, but the room
More rich than Cleopatra's tomb;'
and if none of them have lines which have become current for
their intrinsic beauty or wealth of thought, or for a breadth of
application which has caused them to echo along the decades
from his day till ours, they still present refined and elevated sen-
timents, gracefully, naturally, and poetically, and clothe them in.
pure and nervous English. Six of them are on subjects not
calculated to win an eternity of fame,' being merely graceful.
and hearty compliments to individuals: to his friends Mary
Unwin and William Haley; to Dr. Austin, a physician whose
professional skill had been of service to Mrs. Unwin; to Rom-
ney, the painter, who had executed in crayon a picture of Cow-
per as he appeared in his sixty-first year; to Henry Cowper, on
his 'emphatical and interesting delivery of the defence of War-
ren Hastings in the House of Lords;' and to William Wilber-
force, in grateful recognition of his efforts for the suppression
of slavery and the slave-trade. The one last mentioned rises
་
..
:
Cowper's Sonnets.
177
above the plane of mere commonplace personal compliment;
and, independent of its poetical merits, is historically interest-
ing for its manly exhibition of the poet's feelings, and for its
prophetic forecast of the results that awaited Wilberforce's ef-
forts, as well as of the reward that should finally crown them.
Opening with an assurance to the great philanthropist that his
country listens with disdain to those who call him frantic be-
cause of his great zeal for liberty, he bids him to fear not that
his labor is in vain, and holds up for his encouragement a vision.
of the future when his plans shall be accomplished, and he shall
receive the plaudits of men and angels. The following are its
concluding prophetic lines:
"Hope smiles, joy springs, and though cold caution pause
And weave delay, the better hour is near
That shall remunerate thy toils severe,
By peace for Afric, fenced with British laws.
Enjoy what thou hast won: esteem and love,
From all the just on earth, and all the blest above.'
The finest of his sonnets, and the only one I shall reproduce,
was addressed to a kinsman, John Johnson, who had present-
ed him, then in his old age, with an antique bust of Homer.
Though pervaded by the thick mist of despondency, which
perpetually enveloped his mind at this period of his life, it has
some strong lines, and is specially interesting for its allusion to
his translation of Homer, and the reception it had met from
his contemporaries:
"Kinsman beloved, and as a son, by me!
When I behold this fruit of thy regard,
The sculptured form of my old favorite bard,
I reverence feel for him, and love for thee.
Joy too, and grief. Much joy that there should be
+
-
L
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Afternoons with the Poets.
i
Wise men and learn'd, who grudge not to reward,
With some applause, my bold attempt and hard,
Which others scorn: critics by courtesy.
The grief is this, that sunk in Homer's mine,
I lose my precious years, now soon to fail,
Handling his gold; which, howsoe'er it shine,
Proves dross, when balanced in the Christian scale.
Be wiser thou-like our forefather Donne,
Seek heavenly wealth, and work for God alone.'
"Warton's numerous sonnets cover a wide range; but are
particularly noteworthy for the increased attention they give
to natural objects, and for the transition in the application of
the sonnet to poetical subjects of a descriptive kind which
this increase denotes. Instead of being confined, as the sonnet
had been very generally, to amatory, elegiac, or complimentary
subjects, or to the sublimation of some abstract sentiment or
idea, his sonnets largely celebrate historical or familiar scenes
and places, chosen by him for the picturesqueness of their en-
vironments, or for the interesting associations that were clus-
tered around them. Many of the local descriptions in these
brief poems are very attractive; and, indeed, there is scarcely
one of his sonnets, whatever their theme, but will reward us by
the gracefulness and delicacy of its sentiments, and the correct-
ness of its diction and structure. It is true they make no great
pretensions, but the level plain on which they travel reveals so
many inviting bits of retired loveliness, and affords so many
charming glimpses of quiet beauty, that we wonder his poems
are so little known and prized. Probably, however, the neglect
into which they have fallen is due to an excess of correctness
of finish and an over-refinement of taste, which impart to them
an air of stiffness and effeminacy that a closer inspection would
measurably dissipate. To my mind, the transcripts of English
!
Thomas Warton.
179
sights and scenes in Warton's sonnets are extremely pleasing,
and will bear close scrutiny. I confine myself to two of the
most strongly contrasted examples of his manner. The first
is on 'Arthur's Round Table,' at Winchester:
Where Venta's Norman castle still uprears
Its raftered hall, that o'er the grassy foss
And scattered flinty fragments clad in moss
On yonder steep in naked strength appears,
High hung remains, the pride of warlike years,
Old Arthur's board;-on the capacious round
Some British pen has sketched the names renowned,
In marks obscure, of his immortal peers.
Though joined by magic skill with many a rhyme
The Druid frame, unhonoured, falls a prey
To the slow vengeance of the wizard Time,
And fade the British characters away;
Yet Spenser's page, that chants in verse sublime
Those chiefs, shall live, unconscious of decay.'
Another, was written after a visit to Wilton House, the mag-
nificent seat of the Pembrokes, which suggests to the poet a
contrast between its splendor and the rude simplicity of his
own quarters at Oxford University:
-
"From Pembroke's princely dome, where mimic art
Decks with a magic hand the dazzling bowers,
Its living hues where the warm pencil pours,
And breathing forms from the rude marble start,—
How to life's humbler scene can I depart?
My breast all glowing from these gorgeous towers,
In my lone cell how cheat the sullen hours!
Vain the complaint; for fancy can impart
(To fate superior, and to fortune's doom)
Whate'er adorns the stately-storied hall:
180
Afternoons with the Poets.
She, mid the dungeon's solitary gloom,
Can dress the graces in their Attic pall,
Bid the green landskip's vernal beauty bloom,
And in bright trophies clothe the twilight wall.'
"This concludes my examples of a school, or rather of a
succession, of poets, who made a deep impression upon the po-
etry of their own times and of after generations, and whose
wholesome influence directed it to the purer, more picturesque,
and more richly imaginative models of our early English poet-
ical literature, such as Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe,
Ben Jonson, and the like, in preference to the more artificial
and more purely intellectual productions of Davies, Donne,
Waller, Cowley, Addison, and Pope. Although they wrote
few sonnets, they contributed materially to the development of
the stanza, and greatly enlarged its sphere. They proved that
if it was effective in the narrow field of the sentiments, it was
also adapted to depict beauty everywhere, whether animate or
inanimate; to describe loveliness in every kind; to paint sights
and scenes and forms in every variety; to give voice to all
tones of passion or emotion; to sound the stops of praise or
blame, of love or friendship, of defiance, warning, counsel, im-
precation, and devotion. Henceforward the sonnet was to take
a wider flight than its first inventors ever dreamed of.
"The further development of the uses of the sonnet and
the enlargement of its scope and influence are largely due to
a poet upon whom the example of those who rejected the
canons of the intellectual school of Addison and Pope had not
been lost. The poet to whom I refer has not been accorded,
nor indeed did he deserve to be accorded, the highest, or even
a high poetical rank; but yet, unquestionably, he exerted a
powerful plastic influence, especially as regards the powers and
William Lisle Bowles.
181
scope of the sonnet, upon two modern poets of acknowledged
genius, whose writings have exercised a subtler, more widely
diffused, and more permanent impression on English poetry
than those of any other authors of modern times. I speak of
William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), who, as we learn from their
own grateful and repeated acknowledgments, first directed the
attention of Wordsworth and Coleridge to the latent capabili-
ties of the sonnet, and by his own numerous successful applica-
tion of it guided their youthful taste and influenced their ma-
ture judgment to choose it for multiplied and most varied uses.
In his ‘Biographia Literaria,' Coleridge tells us that when he
was in his seventeenth year, the sonnets of Bowles, twenty in
number, then just issued, were presented to him by a school-
fellow, afterward the excellent and learned bishop of Calcutta,
Dr. Middleton; and he adds, with great feeling, that it was a
double pleasure to him, and still remained to him in his mature
years a tender recollection, that he should have received from
a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet by whose.
works, year after year,' he was so 'enthusiastically delighted
and inspired.' In his enthusiasm of zealous admiration for
these sonnets, as his school finances did not permit him to pur-
chase printed copies of them, he made within less than a year
and a half forty transcriptions of them with his own hand, as
the best presents he could offer to those who had in any way
won his regard. Farther on, he declares that his obligations
to Bowles 'were indeed important and for radical good;' for
his tendency, even at that early age, he tells us, was to bewilder
himself in metaphysics. Nothing else pleased him history
had lost all interest for him; poetry itself, even novels and ro-
mances, became insipid to him; and the tendency promised to
become destructive, when he was rescued from it, as he de-
i
182
Afternoons with the Poets.
1
clares, with grateful emotion, 'by the genial influence of a
style of poetry so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real,
and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets and early
poems of Mr. Bowles.' They also rescued him, as he conceived,
from his predilection for the writings of Pope and his follow-
ers, or, as he characterized them in his maturer years, ‘that
school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English
understanding, which had predominated from the last century,'
and whose 'excellence consisted in just and acute observations
on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its mat-
ter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in smooth
and strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form,' the whole being,
as it were, a sorites of epigrams,' in which 'the matter and
diction were characterized not so much by poetic thoughts as
by thoughts translated into the language of poetry.' Words-
worth and Hallam were equally as emphatic as Coleridge with
respect to the poetical merits of Bowles; and of the former it
is related, the information having been derived from his own
lips, that he got possession of the same sonnets which had so
greatly affected Coleridge, one morning when he was setting
out with some friends on a pedestrian tour from London, and
was so captivated with their beauty that he retreated into one
of the recesses in Westminster Bridge, and could not be induced
to rejoin his companions till he had finished them. Mr. Hal-
lam has summed up the merits of Bowles's poetry with his
usual candor and ability. The sonnets of Bowles,' he says,
'may be reckoned among the first-fruits of a new era in poetry.
They came in an age when a commonplace facility in rhyming
on the one hand, and an almost nonsensical affectation on the
other, had lowered the standard so much, that critical judges
spoke of English poetry as of something nearly extinct, and
Bowles on his own Sonnets.
183
disdained to read what they were sure to disapprove. In these
sonnets there was observed a grace of expression, a musical
versification, and especially an air of melancholy tenderness, so
congenial to the poetical temperament, which still, after sixty
years of a more propitious period than that which immediately
preceded their publication, preserves for their author a highly
respectable position among our poets.'
"Of the sonnets which exerted so powerful an influence upon
two eminent poets, and which were so highly commended by a
literary judge and critic whose ability and taste, and the jus-
tice of whose decisions are so universally acknowledged, we
are modestly told by Mr. Bowles himself, in the preface to the
edition of 1805, that 'they can be considered in no other light
than as exhibiting occasional reflections which naturally arose
in his mind, chiefly during various excursions, undertaken to re-
lieve at the time depression of spirits. They were, therefore,
in general, suggested by the scenes before him; and wherever
such scenes appeared to harmonize with his disposition at the
moment, the sentiments were involuntarily prompted.' And,
in the edition of 1836, he further says, in explanation of his
choice of the sonnet as the best form for conveying his reflec-
tions: 'I confined myself to fourteen lines, because fourteen
lines seemed best adapted to unity of sentiment. I thought
nothing about the strict Italian model; the verses naturally
flowed in unpremeditated harmony, as my ear directed, but the
slightest inspection will prove they were far from being mere
elegiac couplets. The subjects were chiefly from river scen-
ery.'-Originally the sonnets of Mr. Bowles were fourteen in
number. These were afterward increased, in the later of the
early editions of his poems, to twenty; and finally to forty-five.
The subjects of the greater portion are from river scenery; or
184
Afternoons with the Poets.
were suggested by castles and other edifices, villages and histor-
ical localities, which, for the most part, were beside rivers or
the sea; a number are on subjects connected with the feelings
and sentiments; several relate to Oxford; two describe impres-
sions made by the music of bells; two are on busts of Milton in
youth and age; one to Sir Walter Scott; and one was inspired
by Turner's picture, 'Morning.' The sonnets on Milton differ
from nearly all the others in being more vigorous, and also in
the absence from them of the out-door sights and scenes, and
of the air of tender sadness and mild melancholy which proved
so attractive to Coleridge in the earlier sonnets. In the exam-
ples that I shall offer of Bowles's style, I shall principally con-
fine myself to those which possess the properties that were so
instrumental in directing the taste of Coleridge and Words-
worth; and necessarily even these must be few. Their plain-
tive minor tone may be accounted for by the explanation that
they were written while he was under the pressure of disap-
pointment caused by unsuccessful love, to dissipate which he
travelled both at home and abroad. The first of my selections
is entitled 'Evening:'
"Evening! as slow thy placid shades descend,
Veiling with gentlest hush the landscape still,
The lonely battlement, the farthest hill
And wood, I think of those who have no friend;
Who now, perhaps, by melancholy led,
From the broad blaze of day, where pleasure flaunts,
Retiring, wander to the ring-dove's haunts
Unseen; and watch the tints that o'er thy bed
Hang lovely; oft to musing Fancy's eye
Presenting fairy vales, where the tired mind
Might rest beyond the murmurs of mankind,
Nor hear the hourly moans of misery!
Examples of Bowles's Sonnets.
Alas for man! that Hope's fair views the while
Should smile like you, and perish as they smile.'
185
The three which follow were written, the first on the eve of
leaving England, and the others on his landing upon the Con-
tinent; and are entitled 'Dover Cliffs,' 'On Landing at Os-
tend,' and 'The Bells, Ostend.' In a note to the last mentioned,
the poet explains that it was written on landing at Ostend, and
hearing the carillons very early in the morning. I begin with
the one inspired by the Cliffs:
"On these white cliffs, that calm above the flood
Uprear their shadowing heads, and at their feet
Hear not the surge that has for ages beat,
How many a lonely wanderer has stood!
And, whilst the lifted murmur met his ear,
And o'er the distant billows the still eve
Sailed low, has thought of all his heart must leave
To-morrow: of the friends he loved most dear;
Of social scenes, from which he wept to part!
Oh! if, like me, he knew how fruitless all
The thoughts that would full fain the past recall,
Soon would he quell the risings of his heart,
And brave the wild winds and unhearing tide—
The World his country, and his God his guide.'
"The orient beam illumes the parting oar;
From yonder azure track, emerging white,
The earliest sail slow gains upon the sight,
And the blue wave comes rippling to the shore.
Meantime far off the rear of darkness flies:
Yet 'mid the beauties of the morn, unmoved,
Like one for ever torn from all he loved,
Back o'er the deep I turn my longing eyes,
3
186
Afternoons with the Poets.
And chide the wayward passions that rebel:
Yet boots it not to think, or to complain,
Musing sad ditties to the reckless main.
To dreams like these, adieu! the pealing bell
Speaks of the hour that stays not-and the day
To life's sad turmoil calls my heart away.'
"How sweet the tuneful bells' responsive peal!
As when, at opening morn, the fragrant breeze
Breathes on the trembling sense of pale disease,
So piercing to my heart their force I feel!
And bark! with lessening cadence now they fall!
And now, along the white and level tide,
They fling their melancholy music wide;
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of summer days, and those delightful years
When from an ancient tower, in life's fair prime,
The mournful music of their mingling chime
First waked my wondering childhood into tears!
But seeming now, when all those days are o'er,
The sounds of joy once heard, and heard no more.'
A fine sonnet, which the poet entitles 'At Tynemouth Priory,"
was suggested, as he explains in a note, by the remains of that
ancient monastery, 'situated on a lofty point, on the north
side of the entrance into the river Tyne. The rock on which
the monastery stood was so elevated as to make it visible at
sea a long way off in every direction, whence it presented itself
to the seamen, as if exhorting them to make their vows when
in danger, and to promise masses and presents to the Virgin
Mary and St. Oswin for their deliverance :'
'As slow I climb the cliff's ascending side,
Much musing on the track of terror past,
་་
Examples of Bowles's Sonnets.
When o'er the dark wave rode the howling blast,
Pleased I look back, and view the tranquil tide
That laves the pebbled shore: and now the beam
Of evening smiles on the gray battlement,
And yon forsaken tower that time has rent:
The lifted oar far off with transient gleam
Is touched, and hushed is all the billowy deep!
Soothed by the scene, thus on tired Nature's breast
A stillness slowly steals, and kindred rest;
While sea-sounds lull her, as she sinks to sleep,
Like melodies that mourn upon the lyre,
Waked by the breeze, and, as they mourn, expire!'
187
Another sonnet, in a similar vein to this, is on 'Bamborough
Castle,' which he informs us was appropriated, together with
its extensive domains, 'by the will of Lord Crewe, Bishop of
Durham, to many benevolent purposes; particularly to that of
administering instant relief to such shipwrecked mariners as
may happen to be cast on this dangerous coast; for whose
preservation and that of their vessels every possible assistance
is contrived, and is at all times ready.' Such was the noble
charity that inspired this sonnet:
"Ye holy Towers that shade the wave-worn steep,
Long may ye rear your aged brows sublime,
Though, hurrying silent by, relentless Time
Assail you, and the winds of winter sweep
Round your dark battlements; for far from halls
Of Pride, here Charity hath fixed her seat,
Oft listening, tearful, when the tempests beat
With hollow bodings round your ancient walls;
And Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower,
And turns her ear to each expiring cry;
..
188
Afternoons with the Poets.
12
I
Blessed if her aid some fainting wretch may save,
And snatch him cold and speechless from the wave.'
The following sonnet is cast in a different mould. Evidently,
it is a reproduction of his own feelings, and in his Works is
styled 'The Influence of Time on Grief.' Its gentleness is
very touching; and the figure of the bird, whose wings have.
been wet in the shower, carolling in the sunbeam, is an exqui-
sitely appropriate one, and a genuine transcript from nature:
"O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on Sorrow's wound, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile :-
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam, of the transient shower
Forgetful, though its wings are wet the while:
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure.'
I shall conclude my selections from this tender poet with a
sonnet in a more cheerful strain, and which is as perfect a pict-
ure as any by Gainsborough. It is entitled 'On a Beautiful
Landscape:'
"Beautiful Landscape! I could look on thee
For hours, unmindful of the storm and strife,
And mingled murmurs of tumultuous life.
Here, all is still as fair; the stream, the tree,
The Developed Powers of the Sonnet.
The wood, the sunshine on the bank: no tear,
No thought of Time's swift wing, or closing night,
That comes to steal away the long sweet light-
No sighs of sad humanity are here.
Here is no tint of mortal change; the day,-
Beneath whose light the dog and peasant-boy
Gambol, with look, and almost bark, of joy,—
Still seems, though centuries have passed, to stay.
Then gaze again, that shadowed scenes may teach
Lessons of peace and love, beyond all speech.'
189
"After its two and a half centuries of naturalization on Eng-
lish soil, the sonnet had now demonstrated its ability to sound
every note of emotion and passion, to express every delicate
and changeful shade of sentiment and feeling, and to depict
every variety of form and color; it could be grave or gay,
sombre or full of brightness, familiar or sublime, tender or
passionate, gentle or severe; it could denounce, entreat, bewail,
exult, and adore; and it was equally suited to illustrate ama-
tory, elegiac, commemorative, pastoral, and descriptive subjects.
Wordsworth and Coleridge early conceived a high estimate of
its exalted office in poetry, and resorted freely to it throughout
their career—especially the former, who has left us more
numerous and more excellent examples of it than any modern
poet. And here I suggest, that as we have now come down to
the comparatively recent times, with which we are all familiar,
it will no longer be desirable, when presenting specimens from a
poet, to note the period over which his life extended, as I have
done hitherto, but I will still continue to adhere to regular
chronological order, as far as may be convenient. Of course
it will be necessary to pass silently over many who have writ-
ten creditable sonnets, simply because it will be impossible to
do justice to them all in the time at our disposal. I must,
190
Afternoons with the Poets.
therefore, confine myself generally to those who have won the
greatest celebrity in the art, or who will serve as fair represent-
atives of their times and contemporaries.
"First among these in rank and undisputed influence upon
the poetry of his own and succeeding times is William Words-
worth, whose sonnets-nearly four hundred in number-form
a very large proportion of his rhymed poems, and cover an ex-
ceedingly wide range of subjects; chiefly, however, on themes
historical, ecclesiastical, moral, pastoral, political (in its nobler
sense), lyrical, and descriptive in their character. Wordsworth
has indicated his deliberate judgment of the high rank of the
sonnet in poetry, not only by his extensive use of it, but also
by his exclusive classification of all his poems in this stanza
under the head of 'Poems of the Imagination,' where they are
to be found in separate series, grouped as they issued, under
some arbitrary or generic head. The first of these groups
comprises so great a variety, on such unrelated themes-relig-
ious, contemplative, imaginative, pastoral, descriptive, and illus-
trative of abstract sentiments and ideas-that he was unable
to give them a more specific title than 'Miscellaneous.' They
are in two parts, respectively consisting of forty-eight and fifty-
six sonnets; and they contain some of his finest utterances-
among others, at the opening of the second part, the noble
lines beginning with 'Scorn not the Sonnet,' already quoted,
in which he recites the pedigree and qualities of the sonnet
from Petrarch to Milton. Early in the first part of this col-
lection is the following, revealing the motives that led him to
adopt this form of verse for so many of his poetical deliver-
ances:
"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And Hermits are contented with their cells;
Wordsworth's Miscellaneous Sonnets.
And Students with their pensive citadels :
Maids at the wheel, the Weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; Bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness Fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground:
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.'
191
Here also are to be found versions of several of Michael An-
gelo's sonnets, which are fine specimens of that great artist's
thoughts transfused in the crucible of the later poet. Of the
two that I shall quote, the first is on Chaste Love, and the
other is an Invocation to the Supreme Being:
"Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,
And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;
For if of our affections none find grace
In sight of Heaven, then, wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit? Better plea
Love cannot have, than that in loving thee
Glory to that eternal Peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour;
But, in chaste hearts uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of paradise.'
"The prayers I make will then be sweet indeed,
If Thou the Spirit give by which I pray:
13
192
Afternoons with the Poets.
My unassisted heart is barren clay,
That of itself can nothing feed:
Of good and pious works thou art the seed,
That quickens only where thou sayest it may:
Unless thou shew to us thine own true way,
No man can find it: Father! thou must lead.
Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind
By which such virtue may in me be bred
That in thy holy footsteps I may tread;
The fetters of my tongue do thou unbind,
That I may have the power to sing of thee,
And sound thy praises everlastingly.'
I should like to quote from this series the charming sonnet
addressed 'To a Snowdrop;' another describing the operations
of Fancy upon the poet's mind; still another on the slowly
sinking Sun; and one opening with the first two lines from
Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet to the Moon; indeed, which to
quote and which to refrain from quoting, is hard to choose,
where so many are beautiful. There are two, however, I can-
not resist the temptation to repeat; one inspired by Evening,
and the other suggested by a sight of London, as seen at morn-
ing from Westminster Bridge:
"It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity;
The gentleness of Heaven is on the Sea:
Listen! the mighty Being is awake,
And doth with his eternal motion make
A sound like thunder-everlastingly.
Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,
If thou appear'st untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Wordsworth's Sonnets "Dedicated to Liberty." 193
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;
And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.'
"Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendor valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a caím so deep.
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still.'
The second of these groups, in the order of their arrange-
ment in his collected Works, is a series 'Dedicated to Liberty.'
They were written on different occasions from 1802 to 1816,
and, like the 'Miscellaneous' sonnets, are in two parts, the first
consisting of twenty-five and the second of forty-two sonnets.
Opening with several which describe the mockery of liberty
that prevailed in France during the Revolution and under the
Consulate, and which depict the degradation of the French at
the feet of the idols they had reared, the others in the series
extol the virtues and deplore the misdoings and neglected op-
portunities of his own land and people; celebrate the heroism,
patriotism, and other great qualities of individuals and peoples
of various lands-in Greece, Spain, Hayti, the Tyrol, Sweden,
etc.; cauterize Tyrants and Tyranny wherever they exist; and,
finally, exult over the overthrow of the Empire and the down-
.-
194
Afternoons with the Poets.
fall of Napoleon. Although many of these sonnets are indis-
putably grand, and all of them either burn with generous in-
dignation or are tremulous with just wrath, they are often
tinged with mere personal bitterness or marred by prejudice;
and hence, as a whole, they are inferior in poetic quality to the
'Miscellaneous' sonnets. Four of them, however, are in a vein
of loftiness so unusual, even with poets, that I shall cite them:
two being devoted to such opposites as the pure and salutary
example and influence of Milton, and the pernicious lawlessness
of Napoleon; one, contrasting England's harvest of great pa-
triot-thinkers with the 'perpetual emptiness' of France; and
another on the indestructibility of British freedom.
I give
them in the order named:
"Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men,
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart :
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.'
"Look now on that Adventurer who hath paid
His vows to Fortune; who, in cruel slight
Of virtuous hope, of liberty, and right,
Hath followed wheresoe'er a way was made
By the blind Goddess;-ruthless, undismayed;
Sonnets "Dedicated to Liberty"-Continued. 195
And so hath gained at length a prosperous Height,
Round which the Elements of worldly might
Beneath his haughty feet, like clouds, are laid.
O joyless power that stands by lawless force!
Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate,
Internal darkness and unquiet breath ;
And, if old judgments keep their sacred course,
Him from that Height shall Heaven precipitate
By violent and ignominious death.'
"Great men have been among us; hands that penned
And tongues that uttered wisdom, better none :
The later Sidney, Marvel, Harrington,
Young Vane, and others who called Milton Friend,
These Moralists could act and comprehend:
They knew how genuine glory was put on;
Taught us how rightfully a nation shone
In splendor: what strength was, that would not bend
But in magnanimous weakness. France, 'tis strange,
Hath brought forth no such souls as we had then.
Perpetual emptiness! unceasing change!
No single Volume paramount, no code,
No master spirit, no determined road;
But equally a want of Books and Men!'
"It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open Sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the check of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost forever. In our Halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
!
196
Afternoons with the Poets.
』.་
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held.-In everything we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.'
The third group comprises, under the title 'Memorials of a
Tour on the Continent in 1820,' twenty sonnets on various
points of interest in Western Europe, embracing cities, moun-
tains, rivers, lakes, castles, cathedrals, etc., and illustrative of
such of the local manners, customs, and traditions of the coun-
tries visited as most impressed him. With these are inter-
spersed nearly as many more brief poetical effusions in a dif-
ferent stanza, generally in the romantic, narrative, or ballad
style, commemorating some striking historical event or some
peculiar national or religious observance or usage. None of
the sonnets in this group are sufficiently above the level of his
average compositions to compel special notice, and although
worthy of close study for their beauties of thought and dic-
tion, their graphic skill, and their healthfulness of mind and
morals, must now be dismissed with this general mention; first
remarking, however, that among them is to be found, in a de-
scription of the fish - women of Calais, the sole instance of
Wordsworth's attempt at drollery in any of his sonnets. With
the exception of a few which are distributed through his writ-
ings without classification, the rest of Wordsworth's sonnets
are grouped under the following heads: "The River Duddon,'
'Yarrow Revisited,' 'Sonnets Composed or Suggested During a
Tour in Scotland in the Summer of 1833,' and 'Ecclesiastical
Sketches, in a Series of Sonnets.' Those on the River Duddon,
he tells us, were 'the growth of many years,' and were com-
posed 'upon occasional visits to the stream, or as recollections
of the scenes upon its banks awakened a wish to describe
Sonnets on "The River Duddon."
197
them.' Each one of the twenty-four, on the Duddon, is a per-
fect pictorial gem, and together they form a gallery of change-
ful beauty and ever-shifting color and motion, in wonderful
variety. Most appropriately may his own lines be applied to
these remarkable poems:
"Pure flow the verse, pure, vigorous, bright, and free.'
In these river sonnets the poet traces the 'struggling rill,'
through various wild scenes of 'lonely nature,' to the rocky
spring where it lay cradled in its mountain birthplace; he
wanders with it from thence to spots where the
"Green alders have together wound
Their foliage; ashes flung their arms around,
And birch-trees risen in silver colonnade ;'
follows it past old remains of
"Hawthorn bowers,
Where small birds warbled to their paramours ;'
nestles with it amidst
“The fragrance which the sundry flowers,
Fed by the stream with soft perpetual showers,
Plenteously yielded to the vagrant breeze;'
rested with it in the retired haunts and leafy tangles, where
'Bloomed the strawberry of the wilderness,
The trembling eyebright showed her sapphire blue,
The thyme her purple, like the blush of even;'
and then went onward with it until it became
"A Brook of loud and stately march,
Crossed ever and anon by plank and arch,'
over rocks and chasms and into the fields; under 'social trees'
.:
198
Afternoons with the Poets.
and by the dwellings of men; past 'barn and byre, and spout-
ing mill,' and sheepcots, and sweet country places, till, increased
by tributary streams, it gathers volume, and, become a majes-
tic river, sweeps through down, and meadow, and orchard, and
woodland, and cattle-covered hills and plains, now 'gliding in
silence with unfettered sweep,' till now, at last, it spreads its
"Bosom under Kentish Downs,
With Commerce freighted, or triumphant War,'
and rushes 'in radiant progress toward the Deep.'
"The sonnets in 'Yarrow Revisited,' of which there are
twenty-three, resemble those on the River Duddon in their
general manner and treatment, but, unlike them, are devoted to
descriptions of disconnected objects; and, in the proportion
that they are more specific and particular, are more confined
and limited in their poetic scope. Thus, in the Duddon son-
nets there is a succession of flowing and changeful landscape.
views and scenes connected with the course of the river from
its spring-head in the mountains to its final home in the ocean;
while in the Yarrow sonnets we have a series of separate cab-
inet paintings, each entirely unrelated to the other, and made
up of a single central object, and its immediate and distinctive-
ly associated surroundings. The character of the sonnets in
this series is sufficiently indicated by their subjects; as, for in-
stance, 'A Place of Burial,' 'A Scottish Manse,' 'Roslin Chap-
el,' 'The Glen of Loch Etive,' 'Eagles,' 'The Highland Hut,'
'The Brownie,' 'Bothwell Castle,' etc. Some of these cabinet
pictures are minutely finished, exhibiting marvellous skill in
their arrangement, with great delicacy of touch and elaboration
of detail, and combining simplicity with grace. It must be
said of them, however, that their pictorial and descriptive qual-
The Yarrow Sonnets.
199
ities are those of the photograph, accurate and literal, rather
than creative and imaginative, as are those of the painting.
The two sonnets which follow are good examples of the prev-
alent style of those in this series, and are also fine specimens.
of the poet's treatment of opposite but typical features of
Scottish scenery. The first is entitled 'On the Sight of a
Manse in the South of Scotland :'
"Say, ye far-travelled clouds, far-seeing hills,
Among the happiest looking Homes of men
Scatter'd all Britain over, through deep glen,
Or airy upland, and by forest rills,
And o'er wide plains whereon the sky distills
Her lark's loved warblings, does aught meet your ken
More fit to animate the Poet's pen,
Aught that more surely by its aspect fills
Pure minds with sinless envy, than the Abode
Of the good Priest; who, faithful through all hours
To his high charge, and truly serving God,
Has yet a heart and hand for trees and flowers,
Enjoys the walks his Predecessors trod,
Nor covets lineal rights in lands and towers.'
The other was composed in 'The Glen of Loch Etive,' whose
wildly beautiful environing scenery it photographs in its first
five lines:
"This land of Rainbows, spanning glens whose walls,
Rock-built, are hung with rainbow-colored mists,
Of far-fetched Meres, whose salt flood never rests,
Of tuneful caves and playful waterfalls,
Of mountains varying momently their crests-
Proud be this Land! whose poorest Huts are Halls
Where Fancy entertains becoming guests;
While native song the heroic Past recalls.
*
14
:
200
Afternoons with the Poets.
Thus in the net of her own wishes caught,
The Muse exclaimed; but Story now must hide
Her trophies, Fancy crouch ;—the course of pride
Has been diverted, other lessons taught,
That make the Patriot-spirit bow her head
Where the all-conquering Roman feared to tread.'
"The 'Sonnets Composed During a Tour in Scotland' must
be ranked among the most imaginative of Wordsworth's writ-
ings. Much of this is due to the shadowy romance of tradi-
tional feeling, and the real grandeur which invest many of the
subjects he chose to illustrate; for it was impossible that a
poet of his genius should write otherwise than grandly on such
suggestive themes as Staffa, the Cave of Fingal, Iona, Mona, the
Isle of Man, Ailsa Crag, and the like. There are forty-five in
this series; and although principally relating to historic or sto-
ried Scottish scenes, they are not exclusively confined to these,
being preluded by nearly half a score describing localities on
the road to Scotland, with which the poet had been closely as-
sociated as boy and man, and also being interspersed with oth-
ers having a personal or legendary interest. The first of this
series which I shall repeat belongs to the prefatory sonnets,
and has an interest personal to the poet, having been written
by him 'In Sight of the Town of Cockermouth,' where he was
born, and where his father's remains lay buried:
"A point of life between my Parents' dust,
And yours, my buried Little-ones! am I;
And to those graves looking habitually
In kindred quiet I repose my trust.
Death to the innocent is more than just,
And, to the sinner, mercifully bent;
So may I hope, if truly I repent
And meekly bear the ills which bear I must:
ཟ་
The Scottish Sonnets.
And You, my Offspring! that do still remain,
Yet may outstrip me in the appointed race,
If e'er, through fault of mine, in mutual pain
We breathed together for a moment's space,
The wrong, by love provoked, let love arraign,
And only love keep in your hearts a place.'
201
Another fine sonnet in this series commemorates the landing of
Mary Queen of Scots at the mouth of the Derwent, when she
fled from Scotland after the defeat of her adherents at Lang-
side, and rashly threw herself upon the tender mercies of Eliza-
beth. Without a change of clothes or the commonest neces-
saries of life, she had embarked from Dundrennan in an open
fishing bark with about twenty attendants, had crossed the
Solway, and landed, after a day's exposure at Workington, in
Cumberland, and was conducted from thence to Carlisle, where
her arrival caused the most frantic enthusiasm in town and vil-
lage, farm and manor-house, as the story of her coming flew
from lip to lip among the Cumberland squires. It was this act
of generous but mistaken confidence in Elizabeth's magnanim-
ity that inspired the following sonnet:
"Dear to the Loves, and to the Graces vowed,
The Queen drew back the wimple that she wore;
And to the throng how touchingly she bowed
That hailed her landing on the Cumbrian shore;
Bright as a Star (that, from a sombre cloud
Of pine-tree foliage poised in air, forth darts,
When a soft summer gale at evening parts
The gloom that did its loveliness enshroud)
She smiled; but Time, the old Saturnian Seer,
Sighed on the wing as her foot pressed the strand,
With steps prelusive to a long array
Of woes and degradations hand in hand,
:
202
Afternoons with the Poets.
Weeping captivity, and shuddering fear,
Stilled by the ensanguined block of Fotheringay!'
In a curious sonnet inscribed to 'Steamboats, Viaducts, and
Railways,' Wordsworth enters his protest against the maudlin
sentimentality of those who, like his predecessor Bowles and
our own Ruskin, see in modern utilitarian improvements noth-
ing but fancy-killing and health-destroying agencies:
"Motions and Means, on land and sea at war
With old poetic feeling, not for this
Shall ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar
The loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense
Of future change, that point of vision whence
May be discovered what in soul ye are.
In spite of all that beauty may disown
In your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time,
Pleased with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,
Accepts from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.'
The sonnet following, 'On the Cave of Staffa," with which
the outline of this group will be concluded, is an example of
Wordsworth's lofty romantic style:
"Ye shadowy Beings, that have rights and claims
In every cell of Fingal's mystic Grot,
Where are ye? Driven or venturing to the spot,
Our Fathers glimpses caught of your thin Frames,
And, by your mien and bearing, knew your names;
And they could hear his ghostly song who trod
Earth, till the flesh lay on him like a load,
While he struck his desolate harp without hopes or aims.
Account of the "Ecclesiastical" Sonnets.
Vanished ye are, but subject to recall;
Why keep we else the instincts whose dread law
Ruled here of yore, till what men felt they saw,
Not by black arts but magic natural!
If eyes be still sworn vassals of belief,
Yon light shapes forth a Bard, that shade a Chief.'
203
The remaining sonnets of Wordsworth to be considered are
those which he collected under the caption of 'Ecclesiastical
Sketches.' These form the largest of his systematically ar-
ranged groups, and possess many finely distinctive features.
Chiefly historical, their drapery, as befits their subjects, is so-
berer, and its folds have a statelier sweep than in his other
sonnets; and they are more seldom colored and warmed by
romantic accessories. As contrasted with the 'Miscellaneous'
sonnets and those on 'The River Duddon,' their most striking
characteristics are the terseness and severity of their style, and
the reposeful strength of their sentiments. Sometimes ornate,
but never florid, and occasionally brightened by momentary
flashes of impassioned feeling, as a rule their thoughts and the
garniture of them are cold, grave, lofty, and at first sight may
seem prosaic. But upon a closer inspection and a more
thorough understanding of them, it will be perceived that this
effect is due to the familiar plainness and simplicity of the lan-
guage which clothes his deep thoughts, and that underneath
there glows the genuine fire of poetic imagination.-These son-
nets are in reality a continuous poem, illustrating points and
turns in British ecclesiastical history, just as those on the Dud-
don did the course of that beautiful stream. In the introduc-
tory sonnet of the series, Wordsworth draws attention to this
similarity in the treatment of the two dissimilar subjects, when
he says―
ir
1
204
Afternoons with the Poets.
"I, who accompanied with faithful pace
Cerulean Duddon from his cloud-fed spring,
And loved with Spirit ruled by his to sing
Of mountain quiet and boon nature's grace;
*
*
Now seek upon the heights of Time the source
Of a Holy River on whose banks are found
Sweet pastoral flowers, and laurels that have crowned
Full oft the unworthy brow of lawless force;
Where, for delight of him who tracks its course,
Immortal amaranth and palms abound.'
And he gives the following reason for his recourse to this form
of verse in this connection: For the convenience,' he says,
'of passing from one point of the subject to another without
shocks of abruptness, this work has taken the shape of a series
of sonnets: but the Reader, it is hoped, will find that the pict-
ures are often so closely connected as to have jointly the effect
of passages of a poem in a form of stanza to which there is
no objection but one that bears upon the Poet only-its diffi-
culty.' These sonnets cover three periods in British history:
the first (to which thirty-eight are devoted), from the introduc-
tion of Christianity into Britain to the consummation of the
papal dominion; the second (in forty-two sonnets), to the close
of the troubles in the reign of Charles the First; and the third
(in thirty-seven sonnets), from the Restoration to his own time.
-The first part opens with a sonnet reciting some of the fabu-
lous conjectures much indulged by ecclesiastical writers as to
who first planted Christianity in Britain-whether St. Paul, St.
Peter, or Joseph of Arimathea; and this is followed by others,
affording strongly outlined pictures of the trepidation of the
Druids at the discovery of omens portending the downfall of
their creed, and the opening a way for tidings of Jesus by
Outline of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets.
205
the 'Julian spear;' of the effect of Druidical excommunication
upon an outcast of that faith, who is cut off by 'sacerdotal ire'
from the gift of fire and food; of the dark uncertainty which
invests the history of those early times; of that terrible per-
secution of the Christians in which 'Diocletian's fiery sword'
worked 'busy as the lightning;' of the recovery from this fear-
ful storm, when the survivors renewed their holy rites with
outbursts of vocal gratitude in many a 'reconstructed fane;'
of the
"Soul-subduing vice,
Heart-killing luxury
*
Fair houses, baths, and banquets delicate,
And temples flashing bright as polar ice,'
and other temptations from enervating Roman refinements,
which threatened to sap the hardy virtues of the early Chris-
tians, and to abate their love of 'Him upon whose forehead sat
the crown of thorns;' of the heresies that struck root, and bore
bitter fruit of discord and dissensions among them; of the
wars that resulted in the overthrow of the ancient Britons and
in the Saxon Conquest; of the exposure of bright-haired Sax-
on slaves in the markets of Rome, where the sight of their
beautiful and strong manhood excited the cravings of 'holy
Gregory' for their rescue from paganism, and the salvation of
their distant land; and of the advent of the missionaries of the
Cross, led by Augustine and Paulinus, to England, where their
eloquent persuasions and the example of their sanctity were re-
warded by the conversion of King Edwin.-Christianity hav-
ing now been firmly introduced, the poet reverses these dark
pictures, and in succeeding sonnets portrays, in somewhat
brighter colors at the outset, and with consummate skill
throughout, first, the character of the primitive Saxon clergy,
-
206
Afternoons with the Poets.
and then, successively, the growth of and impression made by
the consoling doctrines of confession and intercession for the
dead; the retirement of war-worn chieftains to the quiet re-
treats of religious privacy; the labors and learning of Venera-
ble Bede; the rise of the Saxon Monasteries, and of Missions
and Travels for the spread of the Gospel among the heathen.
At the close, he describes the irruption of the Danes and the
events of the Norman Conquest, interspersing each with vigor-
ous character-portraits of Alfred, Dunstan, Canute, and Richard
the Lion-hearted, with pictures of the Crusades, and with an
account of the effects of papal interdicts and papal abuses un-
der the final domination of the ghostly power of the Popes.
"The same general treatment is pursued in the sonnets on
the later periods in English Ecclesiastical History; but the
poet more frequently illustrates his recital by the introduction.
of character-portraits of the great men who were either the
product or the controllers of the events he chronicles. He
had already resorted to this method in some of the concluding
sonnets of the earlier period, in which, as has been seen, he
sketched in shadowy outlines the features of Bede, Alfred,
Dunstan, and Richard; but in the two later series, as he be-
gins to tread on surer historical ground, these portraits become
more numerous and grow more distinct and life-like. Along
with them are other paintings exhibiting the influence of relig-
ious beliefs, practices, and ceremonies upon the times, which
are remarkable for the vivid richness of their coloring and
their condensed fulness—or rather, I ought to say, for the ef-
fect of illimitable expansion imparted to them by a few mas-
terly touches, so that our admiration is challenged by the ex-
tent of the field that is covered, and by the multitude of actors
who are crowded into the narrow canvas. In these paintings
The Ecclesiastical Sonnets-Continued.
207
the artist pictures not merely a group of figures, however state-
ly or striking, nor a particular scene of greater or less breadth,
but often in a single line or couplet he depicts vast masses of
men, sometimes embracing a whole people, who are moved by
one impulse or are affected by one common feeling; or he
evokes a landscape, which is bounded only by the limits of a
nation, and comprises in a single view manifold distinct but
combined scenes. One of these expanded pictures occurs in
the sonnet on the mellowing influences of chivalry on those
early times more particularly on the brilliant Court of Ed-
ward the Third and his magnanimous queen, Philippa of Hai-
nault. This sonnet is as remarkable for the broad effects pro-
duced by its unspoken suggestions as for those which are given
utterance in words fit, though few.' Though no names are
mentioned in it, yet the genius of the poet contrives to conjure
up the vision of a long line of renowned warriors, illustrious
nobles, peerless knights, and beauteous women, who pass before
us in shadowy procession; and among whom we see Lancas-
ter, and Gaunt, and Derby, and Warwick, and Hereford-the
Courtenays, the Bohuns, the Beauchamps, the Mowbrays, the
Montacutes, and the Mohuns-the chivalrous heroes De Man-
ny, D'Angle, Chandos, Audley, Despenser, and De Coucy-the
valiant Black Prince, and his royal captive and guest, John
of France the gentle and heroic Philippa, whose humanity
shone like a star in that iron-hearted and iron-handed age, and
who was of such 'distinguished beauty,' says an old chronicler,
'that the statuaries of those days used to make her the model
for images of the Virgin Mary, who was always figured young
and beautiful'—and, last and loveliest of all, the virtuous and
fair Countess of Salisbury, in whose honor Edward instituted
the Order of the Garter, and to whom he inscribed its noble
..
14
208
Afternoons with the Poets.
legend, 'Honi soit qui mal y pense,' eternally consecrated to
womanly purity, and forever striking mean and malignant slan-
der dumb. Such is the vision, which it only requires a gen-
erous fancy, and familiarity with the history of those stirring
times as chronicled by Froissart or Holinshed, to evoke upon
reading this sonnet, especially the eight lines following:
"Where blow
Those flowers of chivalry, to bind the brow
Of hardihood with wreaths that shall not fail?
Fair Court of Edward! wonder of the world!
I see a matchless blazonry unfurled
Of wisdom, magnanimity, and love;
And meekness tempering honorable pride;
The Lamb is couching by the Lion's side,
And near the flame-eyed Eagle sits the Dove.'
A similar, but even briefer though equally expanded picture
is painted in the sonnet on the Crusaders, where the poet
describes-
"That Romance
Of many-colored life which Fortune pours
Round the Crusaders, till on distant shores
Their labors end; or they return to lie,
The vow performed, in cross-legged effigy,
Devoutly stretched upon their chancel floors.'
But perhaps the most signal instance of Wordsworth's power
to produce the blended effect of expansion and condensation
is that which is presented in the following passage of the fine
sonnet depicting the influence of the dogma of transubstantia-
tion, when transmuted into a visible reality by the celebration
of the Mass, upon an entire people:
"The tapers burn; the odorous incense feeds
A greedy flame; the pompous Mass proceeds;
Examples of the Ecclesiastical Sonnets. 209
The Priest bestows the appointed consecration;
And, while the Host is raised, its elevation
An awe and supernatural horror breeds,
And all the People bow their heads, like reeds
To a soft breeze, in lowly adoration.'
Among the portraits distributed over this gallery of paintings,
the most effective are those of Wycliffe, Edward the Sixth, Lat-
imer and Ridley, Cranmer, Elizabeth, Laud, and William of
Orange. As specimens of the poet's manner, I quote those on
Cranmer and Laud:
"Outstretching flame-ward his upbraided hand
(0 God of mercy, may no earthly Seat
Of judgment such presumptuous doom repeat!)
Amid the shuddering throng doth Cranmer stand;
Firm as the stake to which with iron band
His frame is tied; firm from the naked feet
To the bare head, the victory complete;
The shrouded Body, to the Soul's command,
Answering with more than Indian fortitude,
Through all her nerves with finer sense endued,
Till breath departs in blissful aspiration :
Then, 'mid the ghastly ruins of the fire,
Behold the unalterable heart entire,
Emblem of faith untouched, miraculous attestation!'
"Prejudged by foes determined not to spare,
An old weak Man for vengeance thrown aside,
Laud, "in the painful act of dying" tried,
(Like a poor Bird entangled in a Snare
Whose heart still flutters, though his wings forbear
To stir in useless struggle) hath relied
On hope that conscious Innocence supplied,
And in his prison breathes celestial air.
210
Afternoons with the Poets.
Why tarries then thy Chariot? Wherefore stay,
O Death! the ensanguined yet triumphant wheels,
Which thou prepar'st full often to convey
(What time a State with madding faction reels)
The Saint or Patriot to the world that heals
All wounds, all perturbations doth allay?'
There are many other pictures in this series, each in a different
style, too beautiful to be passed over in silence. Among these
are those descriptive of the Vaudois and the Waldenses, of the
Rural Pastor in England, of Village Churches 'lurking among
trees,' of stately Cathedrals, and of the sacred ordinances of
Baptism, Confirmation, and the Lord's Supper. I shall con-
clude our review of Wordsworth's sonnets with four of these-
namely, one each on Baptism and Confirmation, and two on
Cathedrals:
Blest be the Church, that, watching o'er the needs
Of Infancy, provides a timely shower,
Whose virtue changes to a Christian Flower
A Growth from sinful Nature's bed of Weeds!
Fitliest beneath the sacred roof proceeds
The ministration; while parental Love
Looks on, and Grace descendeth from above
As the high service pledges now, now pleads.
There, should vain thoughts outspread their wings and fly
To meet the coming hours of festal mirth,
The tombs which hear and answer that brief cry,
The Infant's notice of his second birth,
Recall the wandering soul to sympathy
With what Man hopes from Heaven, yet fears from Earth.'
“I saw a Mother's eye intensely bent
Upon a Maiden trembling as she knelt;
Examples of Ecclesiastical Sonnets—Continued. 211
แ
In and for whom the pious Mother felt
Things that we judge of by a light too faint:
Tell, if ye may, some star-crowned Muse, or Saint!
Tell what rushed in, from what she was relieved—
Then, when her Child the hallowing touch received,
And such vibration to the Mother went
That tears burst forth amain. Did gleams appear?
Opened a vision of that blissful place
Where dwells a Sister-child? And was power given
Part of her lost One's glory back to trace
Even to this Rite? For thus She knelt, and, ere
The Summer-leaf had faded, passed to Heaven.'
Open your Gates, ye everlasting Piles!
Types of the Spiritual Church which God hath reared;
Not loth we quit the newly hallowed sward
And humble altar, 'mid your sumptuous aisles
To kneel or thrid your intricate defiles—
Or down the nave to pace in motion slow;
Watching with upward eye the tall tower grow
And mount, at every step, with living wiles
Instinct to rouse the heart and lead the will
By a bright ladder to the world above.
Open your Gates, ye Monuments of love
Divine! thou, Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill!
Thou, stately York, and Ye, whose splendors cheer
Isis and Cam, to patient Science dear!'
"What awful perspective! while from our sight
With gradual stealth the lateral windows hide
Their Portraitures, their stone-work glimmers, dyed
In the soft chequerings of a sleepy light.
Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite,
Whoe'er ye be, that thus-yourselves unseen—
Imbue your prison-bars with solemn sheen,
Shine on, until ye fade with coming Night!
212
Afternoons with the Poets.
A
But, from the arms of silence-list! O list!
The music bursteth into second life;-
The notes luxuriate-every stone is kissed
By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife;
Heart-thrilling strains, that cast before the eye
Of the devout a veil of ecstasy !'"
•
Sixth Afternoon.
i
:
VI.
"WORDSWORTH's contemporaries," began the Professor on
the following afternoon, as if resuming a class-room lecture
after a brief recess, "were far less prolific of sonnets than he.
His most intimate friends, Southey and Coleridge, who were in
a special sense his brother poets, though great admirers of the
stanza and gratefully acknowledging the influence of Bowles's
use of it upon their poetic style, resorted to it with compara-
tive infrequency. Southey wrote in all some thirty indifferent
sonnets; which, however, are deserving of high praise for the
purity of their language and sentiments. Their great defect is
their exhibition of an ever-present over-consciousness of self;
as if Robert Southey, his immediate and personal belongings
and feelings, were the sum and centre of universal interest.
Thus, whether he writes on the slave-trade or a valentine, a
rainbow or a tempest, the morning or the sun, spring or win-
ter, the lark or a goose, it is not the throbbing of nature's
pulse we hear, but we are constantly invited to listen to, and
even to count, the poet's own heart-beats. Nearly all his im-
ages, comparisons, and fancies go forth from and return to him-
self; finding there their impulse, their illustration, and their ob-
jective point. Not merely does he follow Sir Philip Sidney's
injunction to look into his heart and write, but he subjects the
organ to a microscopic inspection and tedious dissection. I
have chosen the following, 'On the Evening Rainbow,' as a
favorable specimen of his style as a sonneteer:
ட,
216
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Mild arch of promise, on the evening sky
Thou shinest fair with many a lovely ray
Each in the other melting. Much mine eye
Delights to linger on thee; for the day,
Changeful and many-weathered, seemed to smile,
Flashing brief splendor through the Clouds awhile,
Which deepen'd dark anon and fell in rain;
But pleasant is it now to pause, and view
Thy various tints of frail and watery hue,
And think the storm shall not return again.
Such is the smile that Piety bestows
On the good man's pale cheek, when he, in peace
Departing gently from a world of woes,
Anticipates the world where sorrows cease.'
Coleridge, strange to say, notwithstanding his high apprecia-
tion of the sonnet, was even yet more sparing in its use than
Southey; having written twenty-three only, if we except some
that were composed in his early youth, when under the excite-
ment of his vehement admiration of Bowles, and which he ex-
cluded from his collected works-though he quotes some of
them in his Literary Biography as literary or psychological cu-
riosities. Those of them which he allowed to stand are of a
very different quality from Southey's; their themes and his
treatment of them are such as was to have been expected from
the author of 'Christabel' and 'Kubla Khan,' and they bear all
the marks of his erratic but exquisite genius. Never deterred
by the simplicity or commonness of a subject from its consid-
eration, he is never hackneyed or overstrained in his exposition.
of it; looking at nature with the eyes of a poet, he is habit-
ually lifted above and rendered forgetful of self, except so far
as it may interpret or act as an interpreter to universal man ;
and he has the rare faculty of forcing the sweetest flowers of
Coleridge's Sonnets.
217
poesy to spring up and bloom in uncongenial or unexpected
places, thus affording the double charm of surprise and enjoy-
ment. Unafraid of criticism, he is bold to lavish the generous
heartiness of his superabounding emotional temperament upon
whatever challenges his attention or admiration, without count-
ing its current market value, and is content to approve or to
applaud alone, if need be. Few sonnets outrank his for the
beauty, and often for the originality of the fancies they en-
shrine, or for the subtle delicacy of their thoughts, and the
gracefulness and precision of their phraseology. So felicitous
are his taste and artistic skill, and so pronounced the poetic
flavor of his sonnets, that, after a delighted perusal of them, our
regret is excited that he has left so few examples of a stanza
in which he so greatly excelled. The first specimen of his
workmanship that I shall offer is a selection from his juvenile
performances. It is a sonnet addressed to the 'Autumnal
Moon,' and contains some passages of marvellous word-paint-
ing, and several lines of transcendent beauty. Note in partic-
ular its first and last lines; but deal leniently with its one
wretched simile in the line where he likens the moon to a weak
and watery eye, because, even in his juvenile efforts, it stands
almost the sole exception to his usually faultless taste. You
will find that the many and great beauties it contains far
more than compensate for this single defect. Hearken now
to the boy-poet:
"Mild splendor of the various-vested Night!
Mother of wildly-working visions! hail!
I watch thy gliding, while with watery light
Thy weak eye glimmers through a fleecy veil;
And when thou lovest thy pale orb to shroud
Behind the gathered blackness lost on high;
218
Afternoons with the Poets.
And when thou dartest from the wind-rent cloud
Thy placid lightning o'er the awakened sky.
Ah such is Hope! as changeful and as fair!
Now dimly peering on the wistful sight;
Now hid behind the dragon-winged Despair;
But soon emerging in her radiant might
She o'er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care
Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.'
In another of his juvenile sonnets, Coleridge gives expression
to his gratitude to Bowles for the awakening caused by his
poems; but the verse in which he pays this tribute far sur-
passes any of the sonnets of his master, in the rich musical-
ness of its flowing periods, and in the pervading odor of its
poetic feeling:
P
"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
Of wild-bees in the sunny hours of spring!
For hence not callous to the mourner's pains
Through Youth's gay prime and thornless paths I went:
And when the mightier throes of mind began,
And drove me forth, a thought-bewildered man,
Their mild and manliest melancholy lent
A mingled charm, such as the pang consigned
To slumber, though the big tear it renewed;
Bidding a strange mysterious Pleasure brood
Over the weary and tumultuous mind,
As the great Spirit erst with plastic sweep
Moved on the darkness of the unformed deep.'
Here is another of his early sonnets, which is almost perfect in
its kind; its concluding couplet being of rare beauty :
"Thou gentle Look, that didst my soul beguile,
Why hast thou left me? Still in some fond dream
Coleridge's Sonnets—Continued.
Revisit my sad heart, auspicious Smile!
As falls on closing flowers the lunar beam :
What time, in sickly mood, at parting day
I lay me down and think of happier years;
Of Joys, that glimmered in Hope's twilight ray,
Then left me darkling in a vale of tears.
O pleasant days of hope-for ever gone!—
Could I recall you!—But that thought is vain.
Availeth not Persuasion's sweetest tone
To lure the fleet-winged Travellers back again :
Yet fair, though faint, their images shall gleam
Like the bright Rainbow on a willowy stream.'
219
But perhaps the finest and most poetical of Coleridge's sonnets
are two written in his riper years, and inscribed, 'To the River
Otter,' and 'Fancy in Nubibus, or The Poet in the Clouds.'
I shall not attempt to analyze them, any more than I would
undertake to reduce the shifting shadows of his own gorgeous
'Cloudland' to their elementary principles:
'Dear native brook! wild streamlet of the West!
How many various-fated years have past,
What happy, and what mournful hours, since last
1 skimmed the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows gray,
And bedded sand that, veined with various dyes,
Gleamed through thy bright transparence! On my way,
Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguiled
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs.
Ah! that once more I were a careless child!'
*
F
220
Afternoons with the Poets.
"O! it is pleasant, with a heart at ease,
Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies,
To make the shifting clouds be what you please,
Or let the easily persuaded eyes
Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould
Of a friend's fancy; or with head bent low
And cheek aslant see rivers flow of gold
"Twixt crimson banks; and then, a traveller, go
From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land!
Or list'ning to the tide, with closed sight,
Be that blind bard, who on the Chian strand,
By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,
Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee
Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea.'
"It is an abrupt transition from the atmosphere of Words-
worth, Bowles, and Coleridge, to that of the greatest of their
contemporary poets, Lord Byron; so essentially different were
their characters as men, and the quality of their poetic style
and genius. Usually, there is a marked contrast between By-
ron's tropical, and at times volcanic style, and their more tem-
perate and more enduring manner; but the difference vanishes
in Byron's sonnets, which are as calm and chaste as theirs. In-
deed, his few poems in this stanza are not greatly remarkable
save for their correct structure, and their freedom from the
pyrotechnical epithets and torrid fancies which spiced so many
of his productions, and which recommended them to the fa-
vor of those whose taste demand such stimulating condiments.
I think his best sonnets are the two following, inscribed by
him ‘To Genevra'—whether a real or an ideal personage, he
does not tell us:
"Thine eyes' blue tenderness, thy long fair hair,
And the wan lustre of thy features-caught
From contemplation-where serenely wrought,
Byron's Sonnets.
Seems sorrow's softness charm'd from its despair-
Have thrown such speaking sadness in thine air,
That-but I know thy blessed bosom fraught
With mines of unalloy'd and stainless thought—
I should have deem'd thee doom'd to earthly care.
With such an aspect, by his colors blent,
When from his beauty-breathing pencil born
(Except that thou hast nothing to repent),
The Magdalen of Guido saw the morn―
Such seem'st thou-but how much more excellent!
With nought remorse can claim-nor virtue scorn.'
221
"Thy cheek is pale with thought, but not from woe,
And yet so lovely, that if mirth could flush
Its rose of whiteness with the brightest blush,
My heart would wish away that ruder glow;—
And dazzle not thy deep-blue eyes-but oh!
While gazing on them sterner eyes will gush,
And into mine my mother's weakness rush,
Soft as the last drops round heaven's airy bow.
For, through thy long dark lashes low depending,
The soul of melancholy gentleness
Gleams like a seraph from the sky descending,
Above all pain, yet pitying all distress;
At once such majesty with sweetness blending,
I worship more, but cannot love thee less.'
"Now let us turn for a moment to a poet of an altogether
different strain, Robert Burns. He wrote two sonnets only,
one of which is of fair merit. Its chief interest, however, con-
sists in the fact that it was written on a birth-day anniversary,
and was suggested by his hearing a thrush sing while he was
taking a walk early in the morning. The reference in it to his
own contented poverty is very manly and very touching:
+
222
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain:
See, agèd Winter, 'mid his surly reign,
At thy blithe carol clears his furrow'd brow.
So in lone Poverty's dominion drear,
Sits meek Content with light unanxious heart,
Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,
Nor asks if they bring aught to hope or fear.
I thank Thee, Author of this opening day!
Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies!
Riches denied, Thy boon was surer joys,
What wealth could never give nor take away!
Yet come, thou child of Poverty and Care;
The mite high Heaven bestow'd, that mite with thee I'll share.'
"Burns's distinguished countrymen, Sir Walter Scott and
Thomas Campbell, wrote no sonnets. That Scott wrote none
is not remarkable, since he was nothing if not a story-teller.
All his most elaborate poetical compositions, whatever their
form, are novels; and even his songs and ballads are cast in
the same narrative mould-each of them embodying some tale
founded on actual or legendary incidents. His bustling, con-
structive mind busied itself incessantly in weaving the many-
hued threads of life and manners, history and tradition, on the
loom of romantic narrative fiction; and the effects that he
studied were intensely real, and were interesting in the propor
tion they were so. He had no taste for, and seldom found
leisure to indulge in, abstract reflection or contemplation, and
hence the sonnet found small favor in his eyes. Besides, the
sonnet could command no large pecuniary rewards, and he sel-
dom wrote where these were not forthcoming. But that
Campbell, whose habits of mind were more leisurely and con-
templative, and whose poetry is often tinged with speculation,
Rogers and Montgomery.
223
should have so completely neglected the sonnet, is more inex-
plicable. Rogers also narrowly escaped being classed with
Scott and Campbell as at least tacit contemners of the sonnet,
as he wrote one only, and that so imperfect as to require ex-
planatory notes to make its meaning clear. But, then, nothing
more was to have been expected of one who, however gifted in
other respects, was wont to say he 'could not relish Shake-
speare's sonnets! Had he drank more freely from that re-
freshing well, he would probably have written other and better
sonnets than this, 'On the Torso :**
"And dost thou still, thou mass of breathing stone,
(Thy giant limbs to night and chaos hurl’d),
Still sit as on the fragment of a world;
Surviving all, majestic and alone?
What though the Spirits of the North, that swept
Rome from the earth, when in her pomp she slept,
Smote thee with fury, and thy headless trunk
Deep in the dust 'mid tower and temple sunk;
Soon to subdue mankind 'twas thine to rise,
Still, still unquell'd thy glorious energies!
Aspiring minds, with thee conversing, caught
Bright revelations of the Good they sought;
By thee that long-lost spell in secret given,
To draw down Gods, and lift the soul to Heaven!'
"One of the most deserving of the minor poets of this
period was James Montgomery. Amiable, unpretentious, fer-
vently pious, his poetry took the hue of his personal character-
* Strictly speaking, even this is not a sonnet; and, probably, Rogers
never intended it to pass for one, if the editor of his Table-Talk correctly
reports him as saying, “I never attempted to write a sonnet, because I do
not see why a man, if he has anything worth saying, should be tied down
to fourteen lines."
15
224
Afternoons with the Poets.
istics; and the religious sentiment with which it was impreg-
nated proved so attractive to a numerous class of intelligent
and devoutly disposed readers, that, in their estimation, its au-
thor was reared into a popular rival of far greater poets. Like
many exceedingly amiable men, Montgomery had strong con-
victions, which his susceptible conscience would not permit
him to stifle. Quick to discern the wrongs and grievances of
the weak, he was sensitively alive to the disabilities or suffer-
ings they caused, and prompt and tenacious in his efforts for
the redress of the one and the alleviation of the other. Gentle
as a woman, he had a woman's patient persistence and forti-
tude; and he was so constant to what he conceived to be a
principle as to incur the charge of obstinacy from men whose
moral nature was less tender than his to the claims of religion,
and less supremely dominated by duty. Many of the critics
and poets of his day revolted against the pious reflections in
which he so freely indulged in his poetical compositions. His
constant display of religious feeling offended their taste, and
was interpreted either as the effeminate whining of a morbid
sentimentalist, or as a politic trading in sacred things for the
popularity it brought, or as an implied reproach of those who
were more reserved, or more fastidious, or less reverent than
he in their religious utterances. And they set themselves to
sneer him out of a supremacy to which he had really never
made any pretensions, and even to depose him from the rank
that he justly deserved. Unfortunately for the reputation of
the poet, they were successful, and the present generation has
not entirely reversed the dictum of his supercilious and con-
temptuous critics. Nevertheless, much of Montgomery's poe-
try, if not indicative of robust genius, is very pleasing; and his
sonnets, with which we are more immediately concerned, will
Montgomery's Sonnets.
225
repay a rigid scrutiny. Of these he wrote a number, mostly
imitations from the Italian, of which the following, after Cotta
and Crescembini, are examples-the subject of the first being
the 'Judgment,' and of the other, the 'Crucifixion :'
"I saw the eternal God, in robes of light,
Rise from his throne,-to judgment forth He came.
His presence pass'd before me, like the flame
That fires the forest in the depth of night;
Whirlwind and storm, amazement and affright,
Compass'd His path, and shook all Nature's frame,
When from the heaven of heavens, with loud acclaim,
To earth He winged his instantaneous flight.
As some triumphal oak, whose boughs have spread
Their changing foliage through a thousand years,
Bows to the rushing wind its glorious head,
The universal arch of yonder spheres
Sunk with the pressure of its Maker's tread,
And earth's foundations quaked with mortal fears.'
"'I ask'd the Heavens-"What foe to God hath done
This unexampled deed?”—The Heavens exclaim,
"'Twas man;—and we in horror snatch'd the sun
From such a spectacle of guilt and shame."
I ask'd the Sea;-the Sea in fury boil'd,
And answer'd with his voice of storms,-"'Twas Man;
My waves in panic at his crime recoil'd,
Disclosed the abyss, and from the centre ran.
I ask'd the Earth ;-the Earth replied aghast,
""Twas man ;—and such strange pangs my bosom rent,
That still I groan and shudder at the past."
-To Man, gay, smiling, thoughtless Man, I went,
And ask'd him next;-He turn'd a scornful eye,
Shook his proud head, and deign'd me no reply.'
L
226
Afternoons with the Poets.
'If a comparison were made between the sonnets of Shelley
and Keats, on the first impression the former would seem the
most masculine; but a more intimate acquaintance would re-
veal that the superiority of Shelley in this particular is more
apparent than real, and is due to a trick of manner or garb,
rather than to intrinsic force of expression or reach of thought.
Shelley's language (of course I am speaking of the sonnets
only of the two poets) is more swelling and resonant than that
of Keats, sometimes touching closely on tumidity even; and as
he more commonly assumes the attitude of a censor or a cynic,
his tones are more imperative, but they are inferior in clearness,
sweetness, and sustained fulness. Keats's sonnets are exuber-
antly poetic; some of their lines are cast in the most perfect
musical forms of which our tongue is capable; and there are
numerous passages in them which are tremulous with Nature's
sweetest secrets. Beneath their quiet exterior lie hid a world
of luxurious but innocent sensuousness, and an inexhaustible re-
serve of fiery ardor; so that, often, the reader will be startled
by the intensity of the thoughts and images which unexpect-
edly gleam from beneath words of Lydian softness, or which
glow underneath lines of melting smoothness. Doubtless Shel-
ley's sonnets seemed more brilliant than his when they were
originally uttered; but brilliance is a fleeting quality, and
their lustre is growing more and more dim with the lapse of
time. Then, too, the interests to which they appeal and the
tastes to which they minister are fewer, less general and emo-
tional, and more transitory. Keats's sonnets are steeped in the
love of the beautiful; and thus he is enabled to touch chords
which vibrate in every bosom, and to which all hearts that en-
joy beauty, or that have ever loved or are capable of loving, will
always respond. As has been said of Shakespeare's writings-
Shelley's Sonnets.
227
in a lower degree, but in a like sense-his sonnets are 'not for
a day, but for all time:' they belong to the class of poetry
which depends not upon the memories, the tastes, or the inci-
dents of a particular age for its intelligibility or acceptableness,
but is understood and enjoyed in every age by all 'kinds and
conditions' of men.
66
Among those of Shelley's sonnets which have a more per-
manent interest are three of widely differing qualities, but each
meritorious in its kind. One is a terse, vigorous, and rather
matter-of-fact amplification of the thought:
"Man who man would be,
Must rule the empire of himself,'
and applying it to the political greatness of an aggregation of
men in a nation; another is a collection of semi-metaphysical
questionings, as much in vogue in Shelley's day as in our own,
respecting man's future after death, to which, like our mod-
ern questioners, the sceptical poet can find no satisfactory re-
sponse; and the third, and best, which I cite, is based on a
legendary inscription found upon the remains of an antique
colossal statue:
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
228
Afternoons with the Poets.
66
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'
'There is a sonnet of Shelley's which derives a peculiar in-
terest from the circumstance that it is not to be found in his
collected writings, and was first published verbatim from a copy
in his own handwriting in the St. James Magazine for March,
1876. Veiling a parable, it is in many respects one of the
finest of Shelley's sonnets, and is inscribed, 'To the Nile:'
(6
"Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Ethiopian dells,
And from the desart's ice-girt pinnacles
Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.
Girt then with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile's aerial urn, with rapid spells
Urging its waters to their mighty end.
O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level,
And they are thine, O Nile-and well thou knowest
That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil
And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.
Beware, O man—for knowledge must to thee
Like the great flood to Egypt ever be.'
'Of Keats's sonnets no just or adequate judgment can be
formed by a solitary selection. Each of them discloses Nature
in some winning mood or lovely attitude: one unveils a hidden
beauty of the winsome dame; another is redolent with the fra-
grance of her sweet breath; another is musical with the melody
of her'native wood-notes wild;' another palpitates with the un-
ceasing motion of her swelling bosom; and another glows with
the rich and changeful hues which bedeck her glorious form:
so varied are they, and so dissimilar, that neither is a criterion
}
Passages from Keats's Sonnets.
229
by which to form an estimate of the other. That this is not
the language of exaggeration, a few passages culled almost at
random from his sonnets will show. Take, for instance, this
delicate pencilling of the evening moon :
"Cynthia is from her silken curtains peeping
So scantly, that it seems her bridal night,
And she her half-discovered revels keeping;'
and this other, full of vague detail, inspired by the ocean:
"The ocean, with its vastness, its blue green,
Its ships, its rocks, its caves, its hopes, its fears—
Its voice mysterious.'
Elsewhere, in a line of liquid melody, he tells of a happy shep-
herd,
'Whose lips have trembled with a maiden's eyes;'
and in another he epitomizes the character of a friend who
had suffered manfully for his opinions, but whose spirit never-
theless remained
""As free
As the sky-searching lark, and as elate.'
Again, in a sonnet to Solitude, occur these two lines fragrant
with the breath of the woodland, in which he prays to be al-
lowed to keep his vigils to the coy nymph
"Mongst boughs pavilion'd, where the deer's swift leap,
Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.'
Another passage is musical with the myriad sounds of evening:
"The unnumber'd sounds that evening store;
The song of birds-the whisp'ring of the leaves-
The voice of waters-the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound, and thousand others more;'
C
230
Afternoons with the Poets.
2
and still another carols the praises of the early musk-rose:
"As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert *
*
*
*
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh blown musk-rose; 'twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that queen Titania wields.'
Briefly painted, in another passage of three lines, is a picture
of a cold, keen evening, which is almost pathetic in its bare
simplicity:
"Keen fitful gusts are whispering here and there
Among the bushes half leafless and dry;
The stars look very cold about the sky;'
and in a still briefer passage there is this comparison, as bold
as it is beautiful—
"Whiter than a star,
Or hand of hymning angel, when 'tis seen
The silver strings of heavenly harp atween.'
The lines that I shall now quote, in which the poet appeals to
Music to inspire his verse, form a fit close to this medley of
sweet sounds, and an equally fit prelude to such of his sonnets
as I have selected for your entertainment:
"Let music wander round my ears,
And as it reaches its delicious ending,
Let me write down a line of glorious tone.'
"The sonnets which follow are upon widely unlike themes.
Each exhibits a method of treatment and a use of figures and
harmonies peculiar to itself, and artistically adapted to its cen-
Specimens of Keats's Sonnets.
231
tral thought. The first embodies the vision of some real or
imaginary Euphrosyne of Keats's fancy:
'Nymph of the downward smile, and sidelong glance!
In what diviner moments of the day
Art thou most lovely? when gone far astray
Into the labyrinths of sweet utterance ?
Or when serenely wand'ring in a trance
Of sober thought? Or when starting away,
With careless robe to meet the morning ray,
Thou sparest the flowers in thy mazy dance?
Haply 'tis when thy ruby lips part sweetly,
And so remain, because thou listenest.
But thou to please wert nurtured so completely
That I can never tell what mood is best.
I shall as soon pronounce which Grace more neatly
Trips it before Apollo than the rest.'
The next is an idyl in miniature panegyrizing the refreshing
influences of the cool country upon a fugitive from the heated
city:
"To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven,-to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart's content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear
Catching the notes of Philomel,-
-an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet's bright career,
He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E'en like the passage of an angel's tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.'
232
Afternoons with the Poets.
Here is a strain of music whose notes are rich in sweet sim-
plicity, and were inspired by the familiar tones of the grass-
hopper and cricket:
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead:
That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury, he has never done
With his delights, for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never :
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.'
The last and noblest of his that I shall cite, written on his first
looking into Chapman's 'Homer,' is a sonnet of as masculine
beauty as has ever been crystallized into verse, and by a poet-
critic has been pronounced 'epical in the splendour and dignity
of its images.' Note especially the boldness and grandeur of
the six concluding lines:
"Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken,
!
Henry Kirke White.
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific-and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.'
233
"Another precocious child of song, who literally lisped in
numbers, and whose brilliant promise, like that of Keats—but
briefer even than his-was prematurely quenched in death, was
Henry Kirke White. He wrote a number of sonnets, nearly all
of which were composed while he was a hopeless consumptive.
With one or two exceptions, they are pitched in a plaintive
minor key; and although they are too uniformly sad to be
thoroughly enjoyable, they are so gracefully poetic, and there
is so little of selfish or morbid repining in them, that their soft
murmurs awaken pleasant emotions, even while they touch our
sympathies and suffuse our eyes with tender sorrow. In the
disability for long tasks occasioned by his sickness, he seems to
have found, as he himself tells us, in the 'frequent close' of the
'plaintive sonnet's little form,' a favorite and convenient me-
dium for giving expression to his feelings. The two sonnets.
that follow, inscribed 'To December,' and 'To April,' are in
his least plaintive vein:
Dark-visaged visitor! who comest here
Clad in thy mournful tunic, to repeat
(While glooms and chilling rains enwrap thy feet)
The solemn requiem of the dying year;
Not undelightful to my list'ning ear
Sound thy dull showers, as o'er my woodland seat,
Dismal, and drear, the leafless trees they beat:
Not undelightful, in their wild career,
Is the wild music of thy howling blasts,
Sweeping the groves' long aisle, while sullen Time
Thy stormy mantle o'er his shoulder casts,
And, rock'd upon his throne, with chant sublime,
234
Afternoons with the Poets.
རྩྭ་
Joins the full-pealing dirge, and winter weaves
Her dark sepulchral wreath of faded leaves.'
"Emblem of life! see changeful April sail
In varying vest along the shadowy skies,
Now bidding summer's softest zephyrs rise,
Anon, recalling winter's stormy gale,
And pouring from the cloud her sudden hail!
Then smiling through the tear that dims her eyes,
While Iris with her braid the welkin dyes,
Promise of sunshine, not so prone to fail.
So to us, sojourners in Life's low vale,
The smiles of Fortune flatter to deceive,
While still the Fates the web of Mystery weave;
So Hope exultant spreads her aëry sail,
And from the present gloom the soul conveys
To distant summers, and far happier days.'
On the publication of Kirke White's first attempts at sonnet
writing, a semi-critical sonnet upon the sonnet was written by
an accomplished and philanthropic gentleman, Capel Lofft, in
kindly admonition of the young poet, and advising a closer ad-
herence to the rules governing the construction of this difficult
stanza. As it forms a part of the biographia literaria of the
sonnet, I quote it:
"Ye whose aspirings court the muse of lays,
"Severest of those orders which belong,
Distinct and separate, to Delphic song,"
Why shun the Sonnet's undulating maze?
And why its name, boast of Petrarchian days,
Assume, its rules disown'd? Whom from the throng
The muse selects, their ear the charm obeys
Of its full harmony:-they fear to wrong
•
Charles Lamb.
The Sonnet, by adorning with a name
Of that distinguished import, lays, though sweet,
Yet not in magic texture taught to meet
Of that so varied and peculiar frame.
O think! to vindicate its genuine praise
Those it beseems, whose Lyre a favoring impulse sways.'
235
"Of all the sonnets, however, written during the period
which, for convenience, I shall call the Wordsworthian era, I
know of none that are so neat, or whose manner is so entire-
ly germane to the matter, as those of that gentlest and most
genial of humorists, Charles Lamb. Some of his sonnets,
which he playfully styled his 'ewe-lambs,' are trifles, it is true,
but they are delightful trifles, and far from being empty ones;
for while they are as light as a zephyr, they are instinct with
grace and mirth and delicate meanings. Some are serious, but
it is the pensive, untroubled seriousness that we sometimes see
steal over the sunny face of a free-hearted child; some are
singularly subtle, others deliciously poetic; and all are as trans-
parent as crystal and as unartificial as God's natural benisons,
light and air and water. Although, to adopt his own lan-
guage, the world had given him 'many a shrewd nip and gird,'
and though his life-long burden was a heavy and galling one,
and was made almost insupportable by a family tragedy which
converted his existence into one long act of patient endurance
and exalted self-sacrifice, yet there is in his sonnets no word of
complaint, no trace of repining, no whimper of impatience; but
they are all marked by the same blithe sweetness and quaint
humor that gave so great a charm to his delightful essays.
The nearest semblance to impatience that I have discovered
in any of them is in the one where, in a vein of serio-comic
mockery, he rails at work; and even then it is a make-believe
236
Afternoons with the Poets.
impatience suggested by the irksomeness of his clerkly occu-
pation, and playfully directed against himself—'a prisoner to
the desk,' as he said, 'chained to that galley for thirty years.'
This sonnet is so thoroughly Lamb-ish that I will repeat it:
"Who first invented work, and bound the free
And holyday rejoicing spirit down
To the ever-haunting importunity
Of business in the green fields, and the town-
To plough, loom, anvil, spade-and oh! most sad,
To that dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood?
Who but the Being unblest, alien from good.
Sabbathless Satan! he who his unglad
Task ever plies 'mid rotatory burnings,
That round and round incalculably reel—
For wrath divine hath made him like a wheel-
In that red realm from which are no returnings:
Where toiling and turmoiling, ever and aye,
He and his thoughts keep pensive working-day.'
The 'Gipsy's Malison,' one of Lamb's most unique sonnets, was
suggested by an incident which Mr. Talfourd justly thought il-
lustrative of Lamb's 'fine consideration, and exquisite feeling
in morality.' It seems that a young lady, a mutual friend of
the Lambs and Barry Cornwall, had been spending the sum-
mer with the former in the country, and while doing so, as
Lamb tells the story, visited a poor man's cottage that had a
pretty baby, and gave it caps and sweetmeats.' 'On a day,' I
am quoting Lamb's own version, 'broke into the parlor our
two maids uproarious. "O, ma'am, who do you think Miss
has been making a cap for?" "A child," answered Mary
(Lamb's sister), in true Shandean female simplicity. "It's the
man's child as was taken up for sheep-stealing!" Miss
was staggered, and would have cut the connection, but by main
Lamb's "Gipsy's Malison."
237
force I made her go and take leave of her protégé. I thought
if she went no more the Abactor or Abactor's wife (vide Ains-
worth) would suppose she had heard something, and I have
delicacy even for a sheep-stealer.' Out of this story he framed
a picture, of which the situations and incidents have only the
slightest thread of association with the original, the salient
points being a gypsy woman begging a dole from a mother
while engaged in suckling her babe, and, on being refused, ban-
ning both the mother and child with her malison. The result
is a sonnet, than which there is none in our tongue so high-
ly pictorial, or that might be reproduced on canvas with such
weirdly picturesque effect. In the hands of an imaginative
artist, the figures of the mother happy in her babe, and in her
occupation of giving it nourishment from her own bosom, but
with a shade of alarm creeping over her face; and of the babe,
all unconscious of a malignant presence, pushing her breasts.
with his fists in his eagerness to make the milk flow more free-
ly, kicking his rosy feet lustily about on her lap the while; to-
gether with the sunlight pouring in through the cottage win-
dow and bathing the group in its rich radiance, might fill the
foreground; and against them, in the shadowy background,
might be contrasted the dark and threatening face of the bel-
dame, as seen departing through the half-open door, and tar-
rying long enough on the threshold to spit out her venomous
curse upon the mother and babe. Now hearken to Lamb's
own version of it:
"""Suck, baby, suck! mother's love grows by giving;
Drain the sweet founts that only thrive by wasting;
Black manhood comes, when riotous guilty living
Hands thee the cup that shall be death in tasting.
Kiss, baby, kiss! mother's lips shine by kisses;
:
238
Afternoons with the Poets.
Choke the warm breath that else would fall in blessings;
Black manhood comes, when turbulent guilty blisses
Tend thee the kiss that poisons 'mid caressings.
Hang, baby, hang! mother's love loves such forces,
Strain the fond neck that bends still to thy clinging;
Black manhood comes, when violent lawless courses
Leave thee a spectacle in rude air swinging."
So sang a wither'd Beldam energetical,
And bann'd the ungiving door with lips prophetical.'
In several of Lamb's sonnets we have glimpses of 'Elia' in
love—a situation that seems as full of comical incongruity as
that of Falstaff when in the same plight, if we recall Lamb's
methodical, old bachelor ways, his quaint whimsicalities and
queer associates, his stiff primness of manner, his half-clerical
dress always the worse for wear, his nose as prominent as the
beak of a Roman galley, his head pronounced by Hazlitt to be
'worthy of Aristotle,' and his general appearance described by
Leigh Hunt as a 'compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and
the angel.' It is difficult to look without a smile on this odd
and preternaturally slim old-fashioned gentleman, lying, as one
of his love sonnets pictures him, under the trees in a wood, and
engaged for all a summer's day in playing with the free tresses
of his inamorata. The comicality of the thing seems to have
forced itself on Lamb's own keen sense of the ridiculous; for,
afterward, when arranging with Coleridge for reprinting these
effusions, he refers to them and the passion that inspired them,
in the following half-impatient, half-quizzical manner: ‘Take my
sonnets, once for all, and do not propose any re-amendments,
or mention them in any shape to me, I charge you. I blush
that my mind can consider them as things of any worth. ***
Call 'em sketches, fragments, or what you will, and do not en-
title any of my things love sonnets, as I told you to call 'em;
}
Specimens of Lamb's Sonnets.
239
'twill only make me look little in my own eyes; for it is a pas-
sion of which I retain nothing; 'twas a weakness, concerning
which I may say, in the words of Petrarch (whose life is now
open before me), "If it drew me out of some vices, it also pre-
vented the growth of many virtues, filling me with the love of
the creature rather than the Creator, which is the death of the
soul." Thank God, the folly has left me forever; not even a
review of my love verses renews one wayward wish in me.'
You will now be prepared for a specimen of one of the things
which excited this impatient retrospect:
Methinks how dainty sweet it were, reclined
Beneath the vast out-stretching branches high
Of some old wood, in careless sort to lie,
Nor of the busier scenes we left behind
Aught envying. And, O Anna! mild-eyed maid!
Beloved! I were well content to play
With thy free tresses all a summer's day,
Losing the time beneath the greenwood shade,
Or we might sit and tell some tender tale
Of faithful vows repaid by cruel scorn,
A tale of true love, or of friend forgot;
And I would teach thee, lady, how to rail
In gentle sort, on those who practise not
Or love or pity, though of woman born.'
The two that follow are in a different strain, and the last of
them Lamb valued most of all his sonnets:
"A timid grace sits trembling in her eye,
As loath to meet the rudeness of men's sight,
Yet shedding a delicious lunar light,
That steeps in kind oblivious ecstacy
The care-crazed mind, like some still melody:
16
240
Afternoons with the Poets.
Speaking most plain the thoughts which do possess
Her gentle sprite: peace, and meek quietness,
And innocent loves, and maiden purity:
A look whereof might heal the cruel smart
Of changed friends, or fortune's wrongs unkind;
Might to sweet deeds of mercy move the heart
Of him who hates his brethren of mankind.
Turn'd are those lights from me, who fondly yet
Past joys, vain loves, and buried hopes regret.'
"We were two pretty babes, the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far, I ween,
And INNOCENCE her name. The time has been,
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart.
But when by show of seeming good beguiled,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart—
My loved companion dropp'd a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved, who shall tell me where thou art—
In what delicious Eden to be found-
That I may seek thee the wide world around?'
Some of the most enjoyable of Lamb's sonnets are those which
he wrote for album verses. This was a kind in which he de-
lighted, and in which he has never been excelled: light, grace-
ful, innocently sportive, a vein of true and earnest feeling lies
hidden beneath the thin surface of their playful gayety. One
of these was written for the album of Dora Wordsworth at
the request of her father; and its grandiose allusion to the
great poet's 'intelligential orchard,' its comparison of Words-
worth to the 'sinning king,' and its punning close, are in the
Lamb's Sonnets—Continued.
241
spirit of pure fun without which Lamb would not have been
Lamb:
"An Album is a Banquet: from the store,
In his intelligential Orchard growing,
Your Sire might heap your board to overflowing:
One shake of the Tree-'twould ask no more
To set a Salad forth, more rich than that
Which Evelyn in his princely cookery fancied;
Or that more rare, by Eve's neat hands enhanced,
Where, a pleased guest, the Angelic Virtue sat.
But like the all-grasping Founder of the Feast,
Whom Nathan to the sinning King did tax,
From his less wealthy neighbors he exacts;
Spares his own flocks, and takes the poor man's beast.
Obedient to his bidding, lo, I am
A zealous, meek, contributory LAMB.'
Another was written in the album of Edith Southey, and
pleases us by its genial aliusions to familiar household names:
"In Christian world MARY the garland wears!
REBECCA Sweetens on a Hebrew's ear;
Quakers for pure PRISCILLA are more clear;
And the light Gaul by amorous NINON swears.
Among the lesser lights how Lucy shines!
What air of fragrance ROSAMUND throws round!
How like a hymn doth sweet CECILIA Sound!
Of MARTHAS, and of ABIGAILS, few lines
Have bragg'd in verse.
Of coarsest household stuff
Should homely JOAN be fashion'd. But can
You Barbara resist, or MARIAN?
And is not CLARE for love excuse enough?
Yet, by my faith in numbers, I profess,
These all, than Saxon EDITH, please me less.'
Lamb's high estimate of the character and office of the Album
•
16
242
Afternoons with the Poets.
is gracefully expressed in some lines in a different form of
verse, which he wrote in the album of Lucy Barton, the daugh-
ter of one of his best beloved friends, Bernard Barton, the
Quaker poet. Reading these lines, we can understand the feel-
ings that prompted him to bestow unusual care upon his Al-
bum Verses:
"Little Book, surnamed of white,
Clean as yet and fair to sight,
Keep thy attribution right.
Never disproportion'd scrawl;
Ugly blot, that's worse than all;
On thy maiden clearness fall!
In each letter, here design'd,
Let the reader emblem'd find
Neatness of the owner's mind.
Gilded margins count a sin,
Let thy leaves attraction win
By the golden rules within;
Sayings fetch'd from sages old;
Laws which Holy Writ unfold,
Worthy to be graved in gold:
Lighter fancies not excluding:
Blameless wit, with nothing rude in,
Sometimes mildly interluding
Amid strains of graver measure:
Virtue's self hath oft her pleasure
In sweet Muses' groves of leisure.
Riddles dark, perplexing sense;
Darker meanings of offence;
What but shades—be banish'd hence.
Whitest thoughts in whitest dress,
Candid meanings, best express
Mind of quiet Quakeress.”
Let us now take leave of the gentle and companionable Elia by
Edward Moxon and "Barry Cornwall.”
243
listening to a sonnet to his memory by his friend Moxon, which
is admirable in itself, and noteworthy as the production of a pub-
lisher who not only made choice books, but choice poetry also:
"Here sleeps, beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast;
In such a spot I would this frame should rest,
When I to join my friend far hence shall go.
His only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Who chants her morning music o'er his bed,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears. Kind heaven, upon her head
Do thou in dove-like guise thy spirit pour,
And in her aged path some flowerets spread
Of earthly joy, should Time for her in store
Have weary days and nights, ere she shall greet
Him whom she longs in Paradise to meet.'
"The time is propitious, while thoughts of Elia yet make
music in our memory, to bring together some sonnets by his
intimate social and literary friends, who were also the friends
of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Of these Bryan Wal-
ler Procter, better known as 'Barry Cornwall,' has secured a
high rank among our modern minor poets, and the first place
among our song-writers. Thoughtful, graceful, tender, and
pure, he is a deserved favorite with all who relish delicacy and
refinement of thought, coupled with brevity and vivacity of ex-
pression. No modern poet approaches so nearly as he to the
spontaneous grace and freedom, or to the lyrical or singing
quality of Herrick's verse. Nearly all his songs, which form
the preponderance of his poetical writings, are pre-eminently
susceptible of musical interpretation; nay, that form of ex-
pression is almost irresistibly suggested and invited by the
244
Afternoons with the Poets.
1
cadenced modulation of his verse. And in this respect they
fully bear out an observation of his own, when, pointing out
the repuisites of the true song, he said: 'It should be fitted
for music, and, in fact, should become better for the accom-
paniment of music; otherwise, it can scarcely be deemed, es-
sentially, a song.' Procter's sonnets bear but a small propor-
tion to his other poems, doubtless because he found the stanza
an uncongenial one for lyrical expression, and also because its
severe limitations did not permit him to indulge in the vary-
ing sentiments, changing momentarily according to his humor
and often quite disconnected, to which he is addicted, and
which impart their most characteristic charm to his songs.
Here are four of his sonnets: the first one, which was one
of his earliest, is an outburst of welcome on the birth of his
first-born, his highly gifted daughter Adelaide, and there is a
delightful extravagance in its expressions of affection; more-
over, it is probably without a parallel for the multitudinous ar-
ray of exclamation points with which he garnishes his terms of
endearment. The others are, respectively, on 'The Fire-fly,'
'The Sea-In Calm,' and 'Henri Quatre :'
"Child of my heart! My sweet, beloved First-born!
Thou dove who tidings bring'st of calmer hours!
Thou rainbow who dost shine when all the showers
Are past, or passing! Rose which hath no thorn,—
No spot, no blemish,-pure and unforlorn!
Untouched, untainted! O my Flower of flowers!
More welcome than to bees are summer bowers,
To stranded seamen life-assuring morn!
Welcome,—a thousand welcomes! Care, who clings
Round all, seems loosening now its serpent fold:
New hope springs upward; and the bright World seems
Cast back into a youth of endless springs!
}:
245
י
Sonnets by "Barry Cornwall."
Sweet mother, is it so?-or grow I old,
Bewildered in divine Elysian dreams?'
“Tell us, O Guide, by what strange natural laws
This winged flower throws out, night after night,
Such lunar brightness? Why,-for what grave cause
Is this earth-insect crowned with heavenly light?
Peace! Rest content! See where, by cliff and dell,
Past tangled forest paths and silent river,
The little lustrous creature guides us well,
And where we fail, his small light aids us ever.
Night's charming servant! Pretty star of earth!
I ask not why thy lamp doth ever burn.
Perhaps it is thy very life,-thy mind;
And thou, if robbed of that strange right of birth,
Might be no more than Man, when Death doth turn
His beauty into darkness, cold and blind?'
"Look what immortal floods the sunset pours
Upon us!-Mark! how still (as though in dreams
Bound) the once wild and terrible Ocean seems!
How silent are the winds! No billow roars:
But all is tranquil as Elysian shores!
The silver margin which aye runneth round
The moon-enchanted sea, hath here no sound:
Even Echo speaks not on these radiant moors!
What is the Giant of the ocean dead,
Whose strength was all unmatched beneath the sun?
No; he reposes! Now his toils are done,
More quiet than the babbling brooks is he.
So mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed,
And sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be!'
"Bold Henri Quatre! gay sovereign! champion strong!
Whose life was one wild scene of love and war,
Here wast thou (thou heir of all Navarre)
246
Afternoons with the Poets.
Nursed to the music of a peasant's song;
And well it was, indeed, when thou wast young,
That fearless Truth and social Nature taught
Thee lessons, unto monarchs seldom brought;
And duties which to men and kings belong.
Be sure, when princes learn-'midst equal mates,
Frequent denial, scant and rugged fare,
Frank intercourse with social joy and care,
Their virtue from such wholesome lessons dates.
These fit them to breathe well God's human air,
And teach them how to sway the hearts of states.'
"Another of this cluster of friends was Charles Lloyd, whose
chief claim to recognition is that he was associated with Cole-
ridge and Lamb in a volume of sonnets and other poems made
up of their joint contributions. In this joint volume there
were a dozen or more sonnets of Lloyd's, the sixth, seventh,
eighth, ninth, and eleventh of which Lamb, at the time, thought
'eminently beautiful.' So, at least, he wrote to Coleridge in
1797; but that his affection for his friend colored his then cal-
low critical judgment will be felt by all who read the sonnets.
It did not, however, prevent him from confiding to Coleridge
that he thought Lloyd 'too lavish in his expletives,' especially
in the use of the 'do's and dids.' The sonnet that follows was
one of Lloyd's contributions to this joint venture, and is one
of a series on the death of his maternal grandmother:
"Oh, she was almost speechless! nor could hold
Awakening converse with me! (I shall bless
No more the modulated tenderness
Of that dear voice!) Alas! 'twas shrunk and cold
Her honored face! yet when I sought to speak,
Through her half-opened eyelids She did send
Faint looks, that said, "I would be yet thy friend!"
Charles Lloyd and Bernard Barton.
And (0 my chok'd breast) e'en on that shrunk cheek
I saw one slow tear roll! my hand She took,
Placing it on her heart-I heard her sigh
"Tis too, too much!" "Twas Love's last agony!
I tore me from Her! 'Twas her latest look,
Her latest accents-O my heart, retain
That look, those accents, till we meet again!'
247
“A poet of very different calibre from Lloyd, equally be-
loved by Lamb and his friends, and having far more substantial
literary claims upon their admiration, was Bernard Barton, the
Quaker poet. The great body of his poetry is of a religious
cast, but, as his daughter Lucy has remarked, in her modest
preface to his collected poems, 'There are not wanting those
of a lighter character which will be found to be the whole-
some relaxation of a pure, good, and essentially religious mind.
These may succeed each other as gracefully and beneficently as
April sunshine and showers over the meadow.' Barton's poe-
try makes no lofty pretensions, but it is rich in true feeling,
and evinces a chaste and cultivated fancy. His verse, which is
generally easy and graceful, sometimes conspicuously so, is sel-
dom very faulty; and several of his poems have numerous pas-
sages that are affluent of felicities of expression. On the whole,
his sonnets, which are quite numerous, are probably the most
correct and fervid of his poems, and many of them will com-
pare advantageously with the best by our minor poets. In
strong and favorable contrast with the one just repeated from
Charles Lloyd is this of Barton's, 'To a Grandmother,' of which
Charles Lamb wrote in the margin of his copy of his friend's
poems, 'A good Sonnet. Dixi.-C. Lamb.' The poet opens
by controverting a reflection in Ossian that 'old age is dark
and unlovely:"
248
Afternoons with the Poets.
"O say not so! A bright old age is thine;
Calm as the gentle light of summer eves,
Ere twilight dim her dusky mantle weaves;
Because to thee is given, in thy decline,
A heart that does not thanklessly repine
At aught of which the hand of God bereaves,
Yet all He sends with gratitude receives;-
May such a quiet thankful' close be mine!
And hence thy fireside chair appears to me
A peaceful throne-which thou wert form'd to fill;
Thy children, ministers who do thy will;
And those grandchildren, sporting round thy knee,
Thy little subjects, looking up to thee
As one who claims their fond allegiance still.'
Several of Barton's finest sonnets were suggested by rural, seclu-
ded, or historic places. Among these are two, respectively, on
'Orford Castle,' and on 'Selborne,' the home of Gilbert White:
"Beacon for barks that navigate the stream
Of Ore or Alde, or breast the ocean spray:
Landmark for inland travellers far away
O'er heath and sheep-walk-as the morning beam
Or the declining sunset's mellower gleam
Lights up thy weather-beaten turrets gray;
Still dost thou bear thee bravely in decay,
As if thy by-gone glory were no dream!
Yea, now with lingering grandeur thou look'st down
From thy once fortified, embattled hill,
As if thine ancient office to fulfil;
And though thy keep be but the ruin'd crown
Of Orford's desolate and dwindled town,
Seem'st to assert thy sovereign honor still.'
"That quiet vale! it greets my vision now,
As when we saw it, one autumnal day,
A cloudless sun brightening each feathery spray
Henry Francis Cary.
Of woods that clothed the Hanger to its brow:
Woods, whose luxuriance hardly might allow
A peep at that small hamlet, as it lay,
Bosom❜d in orchard-plots, and gardens gay,
With here and there a field, perchance, to plough.
Delightful valley! Still I own thy claim;
As when I gave thee one last lingering look,
And felt thou wast indeed a fitting nook
For him to dwell in, whose undying name
Has unto thee bequeath'd its humble fame,
Pure and imperishable,-like his book!"
249
There are several other fine sonnets of his, to which I can only
refer in the briefest way: one of these is on the birth of his
daughter Lucy; two are inscribed to William and Mary Howitt;
and two were suggested by his own approaching age. All
these are exceedingly pleasing and genial; but the two last
named are remarkable for their lofty serenity, their spirit of
calm and hopeful resignation, and their profound but thorough-
ly cheerful religious feeling.
66
'Another of this circle of literary and social friends was
Rev. Henry Francis Cary, the amiable and accomplished trans-
lator of Dante, whose poetical merits, especially the merits of
his fine translation, were early discovered, and promptly, gen-
erously, and effectively made known to the world by Coleridge,
at a time when such a service was as the breath of life to the
tasteful and painstaking student. Having already profited by
his translations of several of Petrarch's sonnets, we will now
enjoy some of his original compositions. Here are two, writ-
ten when he was only sixteen, which were inspired by the
buoyancy of youth, and are bright with modest hope:
"I ask not riches, and I ask not power,
Nor in her revel rout shall Pleasure view
250
Afternoons with the Poets.
Me ever, a far sweeter nymph I woo.
Hail, sweet Retirement! lead me to thy bower,
Where fair Content has spread her loveliest flower,
Of more enduring, though less gaudy hue,
Than Pleasure scatters to her giddy crew;
Nor let aught break upon thý sacred hour,
Save some true friend, of pure congenial soul;
To such the latchet of my wicket-gate
Let me lift freely, glad to share the dole
Fortune allows me, whether small or great,
And a warm heart, that knows not the control
Of Fortune, and defies the frown of Fate.'
"Oft do I burn to snatch the epic lyre,
And from its strings to call such potent lays
As may the wide world fill with dumb amaze,
And rank me in that bright celestial choir
Of bards, who sung Achilles' fatal ire,
The pious Trojan wandering through the seas,
Or, O far nobler theme! the woeful days
Of our prime parents. Yet my vain desire
Still would the Muse restrain. She to the wave
On which the volant youth bestowed a name,
Points timid. Scarce my sixteenth summer dawns!
Degrading thought! Then, ye vain dreams of fame,
Away—what higher guerdon can I crave,
If my song charms the nymphs and rustic fawns ?'
The only other sonnet of his that I shall cite was the fruit of
later years, when repeated and stunning blows had dispelled
the illusions of his early years. It was the father's tribute to
the memory of a beloved daughter, who had sympathized with
his delicate tastes and shared his studies, and who died in the
bloom of her fresh youth:
1
Thomas Noon Talfourd.
"Thrice has the dart of Death my peace bereaved;
First, gentle mother, when it laid thee low,
Then was my morn of life o'ercast with woe,
And oft through youth the lonely sigh was heaved.
But in a child I thought thou wert retrieved,
She loved me well, nor from my side would go
Through fields by summer scorch'd or wintry snow:
How o'er that little bier at noon I grieved!
Last when as time has touch'd my locks with white,
Another now had learnt to shed fresh balm
Into the wounds, and with a daughter's name
Was as a seraph near me, to delight,
Restoring me by wisdom's holy calm.
Oh, Death! I pray thee next a kinder aim.'
251
“There is one other of this group of poet-friends whose son-
nets remain to be briefly noticed-Thomas Noon Talfourd, the
biographer of Lamb, whose character was as spotless as the
ermine he wore, and who was eminently respectable, alike as a
man, a lawyer, a judge, and a poet. Talfourd's greatest literary
efforts were in the line of the drama; and if his plays seldom
reached to the heights of sublimity, they never descended to
the level of the commonplace, and have been uniformly suc-
cessful upon the stage. His tragedy is a mild-complexioned
muse, impressing us more by its gentleness, sweetness, and free
play of the affections than by those grand, or sublime, or terri-
ble situations and doings, or those violent and startling muta-
tions which make tragedy tragical: while they often draw tears.
of pity or compassion, they rarely vehemently move the sterner
feelings or stir the passions. His friend Macready correctly
described 'Ion,' his dramatic masterpiece, when he styled it a
'sweet tragic poem;' and the characterization is not an inapt
one for all his dramatic performances. His sonnets are fair
252
Afternoons with the Poets.
་
exponents of the average style of the most of those by recent
writers clever, correct, dignified, garrulous rather than full,
and temperately cold. The two that I shall repeat have a fac-
titious warmth, unusual in his sonnets, due to the associations
of his boyhood awakened by their themes, and are in his most
pleasing style. They are both on scenes connected with Read-
ing, where he was born: the first, being the record of his im-
pressions of 'The Forbury' at that place, when visited on a
misty evening in autumn after years of absence; and the
other, some reflections awakened by a 'View of the Valley of
Reading:
"Soft uplands, that in boyhood's earliest days
Seemed mountain-like and distant, fain once more
Would I behold you! but the autumn hoar
Hath veiled your pensive groves in evening haze;
Yet must I wait till on my searching gaze
Your outline lives,-more dear than if ye wore
An April sunset's consecrating rays,—
For even thus the images of yore
Which ye awaken glide from misty years,
Dream-like and solemn, and but half unfold
Their tale of glorious hopes, religious fears,
And visionary schemes of giant mould;
Whose dimmest trace the world-worn heart reveres,
And, with love's grasping weakness, strives to hold.'
"Too long have I regarded thee, fair vale,
But as a scene of struggle which denies
All pensive joy; and now with childhood's eyes
In old tranquillity, I bid thee hail;
And welcome to my soul thy own sweet gale,
Which wakes from loveliest woods the melodies
Of long-lost fancy. Never may there fail
Within thy circlet spirits born to rise
Charlotte Smith.
In honor,-whether won by Freedom rude
In her old Spartan majesty, or wrought
With partial, yet no base regard, to brood
O'er usages by time with sweetness fraught;
Be thou their glory-tinted solitude,
The cradle and the home of generous thought!'
253
"This rapid review of the sonnet writers who flourished in
the period covered by the life of Wordsworth would be very
imperfect if it excluded all mention of the productions of the
intellectual women who then embellished English literature by
their writings. Prominent among these were Maria Edge-
worth, Hannah More, Anna Seward, Joanna Baillie, Charlotte
Smith, and Mrs. Hemans; several of whom, and especially the
last two, were prolific and accomplished sonneteers. Our af
ternoon is drawing so rapidly to a close, however, that it will
be impossible to give instances from each of these; and al-
though the choice is attended with difficulty, I shall be obliged
to select one or two as representatives of all. On the whole,
perhaps, I should not greatly err if I confined my selections to
Mrs. Hemans, as being the one whose poetry is best known to
the women of America, and to which their tastes are most re-
sponsive. I will, however, first prelude my examples from her
by two sonnets from an earlier writer, Charlotte Smith, whose
productions in this stanza are not only numerous, but of such
elegance and merit as to command the homage of all who are
interested in the history of its growth and development. Her
sonnets-ninety-two in number-are upon the most varied, dis-
connected themes, embracing thoughts on the seasons, the
heavenly bodies, birds and flowers, rivers, historic or storied
places, the sentiments and platonic feelings; and among them
are many spirited translations and adaptations from Petrarch,
254
Afternoons with the Poets.
=
Metastasio, and other Italian poets, together with a number of
graceful tributes of friendship. None of them can be classed
as belonging to the poetry of the passions; indeed, they are
seldom even impassioned, though they are invariably sincere,
earnest, thoughtful, chaste, and kindly. From her large store I
choose two only: the first, 'To the River Arun', contains an
interesting allusion to the poet Otway; and its companion is a
graceful bit of moralizing on 'The Glowworm:"
"On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn,
No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear,
Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn,
And still to her thy rustic waves be dear.
For with the infant Otway, lingering here,
Of early woes she bade her votary dream,
While thy low murmurs sooth'd his pensive ear,
And still the poet-consecrates the stream.
Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side,
The first-born violets of the year shall spring;
And in thy hazels, bending o'er the tide,
The earliest Nightingale delight to sing:
While kindred spirits, pitying, shall relate
Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate!'
"When on some balmy-breathing night of Spring
The happy child, to whom the world is new,
Pursues the evening moth, of mealy wing,
Or from the heath-bell beats the sparkling dew;
He sees before his inexperienced eyes
The brilliant Glowworm, like a meteor, shine
On the turf-bank;-amazed, and pleased, he cries,
"Star of the dewy grass!—I make thee mine!"
Then, ere he sleeps, collects "the moistened" flower,
And bids soft leaves his glittering prize enfold,
Felicia Hemans.
And dreams that Fairy-lamps illume his bower:
Yet with the morning shudders to behold
His lucid treasure, rayless as the dust!
So turn the World's bright joys to cold and blank disgust!'
255
"Without attempting a critical estimate of a writer as wide-
ly and familiarly known as Mrs. Hemans, I shall now dedicate
our few remaining moments to some of her sonnets. She
wrote over a hundred, of which thirty-two are translations
from Petrarch, Tasso, Camoens, Bentivoglio, and other Conti-
nental poets of eminence; and the remainder are original com-
positions. These last, written at different periods of her life,
comprise five separate series, severally designated by her, 'On
the Female Characters of the Bible,' 'Sonnets Devotional and
Memorial,' 'Records of the Spring of 1834,' 'Records of the
Autumn of 1834,' and 'Thoughts during Sickness.'-We have
already heard the sonnet when, as a ‘small lute,' it ‘gave ease
to Petrarch's wound,' and we have seen it when it
'glittered a gay myrtle Leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow:'
Her translations now afford us an opportunity to hear the ech-
oes of the 'pipe,' which 'a thousand times did Tasso sound,'
and with which 'Camoens soothed an Exile's grief.' The ver-
sion from Camoens, which I will repeat first, is a paraphrase
of the melting lamentation put in the mouths of the captive
Israelites by the Royal Psalmist-' By the Waters of Babel '-
and is a strain such as we would expect from a poet-exile in a
strange land:
"Wrapt in sad musings, by Euphrates' stream ·
I sat, retracing days forever flown,
17
256
Afternoons with the Poets.
While rose thine image on the exile's dream,
O much-loved Salem! and thy glories gone.
When they who caused the ceaseless tears I shed,
Thus to their captive spoke,-"Why sleep thy lays?
Sing of thy treasures lost, thy splendor fled,
And all thy triumphs in departed days!
Know'st thou not Harmony's resistless charm
Can soothe each passion, and each grief disarm?
Sing then, and tears will vanish from thine eye."
With sighs I answered,-When the cup of woe
Is filled, till misery's bitter draught o'erflow,
The mourner's cure is not to sing-but die.'
The sonnet from Tasso is one of those exceptionally few ones,
whether original or translated, in which Mrs. Hemans indulges
in an amatory strain:
"Thou in thy morn wert like a growing rose
To the mild sunshine only half display'd,
That shunn'd its bashful graces to disclose,
And in its vale of verdure sought a shade:
Or like Aurora did thy charms appear
(Since mortal form ne'er vied with aught so bright)—
Aurora, smiling from her tranquil sphere,
O'er vale and mountain shedding dew and light.
Now riper years have doom'd no grace to fade;
Nor youthful charms, in all their pride array'd,
Excel, or equal, thy neglected form.
Thus, full expanded, lovelier is the flower,
And the bright daystar, in its noontide hour,
More brilliant shines, in genial radiance warm.'
Many of her original sonnets are minutely finished cabinet
paintings of surprising lightness of touch and delicacy of col-
oring. Conspicuous among these are her portraits of 'Ruth,'
་ ।
Sonnets by Mrs. Hemans.
257
and of 'Mary at the Feet of Christ,' and her fine description of
a 'Picture of the Infant Christ with Flowers:'
"The plume-like swaying of the auburn corn,
By soft winds to a dreamy motion fann'd,
Still brings me back thine image-Oh! forlorn,
Yet not forsaken Ruth!-I see thee stand
Lone, 'midst the gladness of the harvest band—
Lone, as a wood-bird on the ocean's foam,
Fall'n in its weariness. Thy fatherland
Smiles far away! yet to the sense of home,
That finest, purest, which can recognize
Home in affection's glance, forever true
Beats thy calm heart; and if thy gentle eyes
Gleam tremulous through tears, 'tis not to rue
Those words, immortal in their deep love's tone,
"Thy people and thy God shall be mine own!"'
"There was a mournfulness in angel's eyes,
That saw thee, woman! bright in this world's train,
Moving to pleasure's airy melodies,
Thyself the idol of the enchanted strain.
But from thy beauty's garland, brief and vain,
When one by one the rose-leaves had been torn,
When thy heart's core had quiver'd to the pain
Through every life-nerve sent by arrowy scorn;
When thou didst kneel to pour sweet odors forth
On the Redeemer's feet, with many a sigh,
And showering tear-drop, of yet richer worth,
Than all those costly balms of Araby;
Then was there joy, a song of joy in heaven,
For thee, the child won back, the penitent forgiven!'
"All the bright hues from eastern garlands glowing,
Round the young child luxuriantly are spread;
258
Afternoons with the Poets.
Gifts, fairer far than Magian Kings', bestowing
In adoration, o'er his cradle shed.
Roses, deep-fill'd with rich midsummer's red,
Circle his hands; but in his grave, sweet eye,
Thought seems e'en now to wake, and prophecy
Of ruder coronals for that meek head.
And thus it was! a diadem of thorn
Earth gave to Him who mantled her with flowers,
To Him who pour'd forth blessings in soft showers
O'er all her paths, a cup of bitter scorn!
And we repine, for whom that cup He took,
O'er blooms that mock'd our hope, o'er idols that forsook!'
And now, see! the sun westers to his setting. Let us listen
in this calm hour, when the song of the birds is hushed and
the hum of the insect world begins to be faintly heard, to the
æolian tones which float in softest music from her sonnets to
"The Sky' and on 'Foliage;' closing all, and the afternoon,
with the sweet chimes of her 'Sabbath Sonnet:"
"Far from the rustlings of the poplar bough,
Which o'er my opening life wild music made,
Far from the green hills with their heathery glow
And flashing streams whereby my childhood played;
In the dim city, 'midst the sounding flow
Of restless life, to thee in love I turn,
O thou rich sky! and from thy splendors learn
How song-birds come and part, flowers wane and blow.
With thee all shapes of glory find their home,
And thou hast taught me well, majestic dome!
By stars, by sunsets, by soft clouds which rove
Thy blue expanse, or sleep in silvery rest,
That Nature's God hath left no spot unbless'd
With founts of beauty for the eye of love.'
Sonnets by Mrs. Hemans-Continued.
"Come forth, and let us through our hearts receive
The joy of verdure !—see, the honied lime
Showers cool green light o'er banks where wild flowers weave
Thick tapestry; and woodbine tendrils climb
Up the brown oak from buds of moss and thyme.
The rich deep masses of the sycamore
Hang heavy with the fulness of their prime,
And the white poplar, from its foliage hoar,
Scatters forth gleams like moonlight, with each gale
That sweeps the boughs:—the chestnut flowers are past,
The crowning glories of the hawthorn fail,
But arches of sweet eglantine are cast
From every hedge:-Oh! never may we lose,
Dear friend! our fresh delight in simplest nature's hues!'
"How many blessed groups this hour are bending,
Through England's primrose meadow-paths, their way
Towards spire and tower, 'midst shadowy elms ascending,
Whence the sweet chimes proclaim the hallow'd day!
The halls from old heroic ages grey
Pour their fair children forth; and hamlets low,
With whose thick orchard-blooms the soft winds play,
Send out their inmates in a happy flow,
Like a freed vernal stream. I may not tread
With them those pathways,-to the feverish bed
Of sickness bound; yet, oh! my God! I bless
Thy mercy, that with Sabbath peace hath fill'd
My chasten'd heart, and all its throbbings still'd
To one deep calm of lowliest thankfulness.'"
259
Seventh Afternoon.
รา
1.
VII.
Ir was our last day in the country, and as the morrow was
to witness the end of our truce to business, both the Professor
and myself felt half glad and half sorrowful-glad to get back
to the fray from which we had been so long absent, and sor-
rowful to leave the fresh-smelling fields and woods and brooks,
where we had been laying up a reserve of new strength for
work by our restful summer fallowing.
When we had settled down in our favorite attitudes, I was
the first to begin. "Professor," I said, "this is the last day
of our poetical browsings; and unless I have misconceived your
drift, I surmise that, having concluded your review of the son-
net-writers who flourished during Wordsworth's long suprem-
acy, you mean to devote the remainder of our time to recent
and living poets. Am I right in my conjecture?"
"Right, my lad," he replied; "your penetration does you
infinite credit."
"I wish I could say as much of your mock-politeness," I re-
torted. "All compliments aside, however, before you begin
your screed—and that, having once begun it, you may proceed
without interruption-let me first ask a question and venture a
criticism.-Speaking of Mrs. Hemans at our last sitting, you
said her translation from Tasso was an instance of her rarely
exceptional amatory sonnets. Now, I am curious to know
whether she was singular in her abstinence; or whether any
264
Afternoons with the Poets.
other female poets have been much addicted to love sonnets or
poems of any kind?"
"I may say in reply that generally our female poets seem to
have realized the inappropriateness-and, indeed, the indelicacy
—of their writing poetry of a warmly amatory kind; and, to
avoid the difficulty or the impropriety, they have seldom in-
dulged in those glowing or wanton descriptions of persons and
situations which have been elaborated with such minuteness by
poets of our own persuasion, and have sometimes been carried
to the verge of impurity by them. No woman, for instance-
-at least no pure woman, or who wished to pass for one-
could have written the Troilus and Creseide of Chaucer, the
Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare, the Hero and Leander of
Marlowe and Chapman, or even the love poems and sonnets of
Spenser, Shakespeare, Herrick, and others that might be named.
Almost without exception, therefore, they have rigidly excluded
from their poetry whatever is supersensuous, or suggestive of
voluptuous feelings, or provocative of passionate desire; and
whenever they have been tempted to give a freer rein to their
muse and to paint the operations of the master-passion, they
have usually cast their poems in the narrative form, or have re-
sorted to translations from the bolder and less scrupulous sex.
Thus, even Charlotte Smith, whose original sonnets are chaste
almost to frigidity, exercised a greater liberty of feeling and
expression under the mask of translations from Petrarch and
Metastasio than she would have otherwise ventured. Even in
her reserved verse, it seems incompatible that a woman should
feign a man's passion, and rave about another woman's 'golden
tresses,'' charming eyes,' and 'beauteous tints,' or of the 'am-
orous zephyrs' that played around her person; but it would be
absurdly ridiculous if she were to write of a man as a man may
Criticism of Recent Sonnets.
265
write of a woman-celebrating those special provocative virile
graces, charms, beauties, and attractions of person which excite
the sensibilities or rouse the passions of woman. Nor have
any
of our female poets with whose writings I am familiar been
guilty of an absurdity so gross or an indelicacy so unwomanly.
Instead, they have preferred, even in their narrative or dramatic
poems, where a larger license was allowable, to ring the changes
on love as a sentiment or an affection merely to voice the
plaints of forsaken or forgotten fair ones, and to describe the
innocent delights of faithful lovers."
"Thanks for your reply to my question, Professor; and now
for my criticism—after which I will again subside into my nor-
mal condition of an animated sponge, eagerly receptive of the
droppings from your overflowing well. In your comments on
Talfourd's poetry, you covertly intimated, I fancied, that the
average modern sonnet is not of a lofty order. This led me,
in the interval since our last conversation, to read up the son-
nets of our more recent poets with some care; and at the
risk of seeming to usurp your prerogative, I will state the im-
pressions made on me by the investigation. Chiefly, I have
been struck by the remarkable general resemblance which the
sonnets of our later poets bear to one another. This resem-
blance is too universal to be accidental, and so great as to ex-
tinguish their individuality; or, at least, so great as to make it
impossible to be sure of the separate identity of their several
authors. It extends to their style and fashion, their structure,
manner, interior methods, and prevailing air and spirit. Though
they may not employ the same words or be engaged on the
same thoughts, they all seem to have been designed after the
same model. Their principal aim, for the most part, seems to
be to embody verbal or intellectual prettinesses, or to construct
266
Afternoons with the Poets.
darkly ingenious enigmas that are hard of or baffle solution.
Moreover, they are too garrulously clever. In nothing, perhaps,
is their similarity more striking than their smooth level of cor-
rect and elegant mediocrity. Now, I think no one of literary
culture, certainly none possessing a discriminating taste, could
be doubtful as to the parentage of the sonnets of Spenser, or
Sidney, or Shakespeare, or Milton, or Wordsworth. It would
be impossible to mistake either for the other. We know as
indubitably, when listening to them, which is Shakespeare's,
which Milton's, and which Wordsworth's, as we know which is
the face of either in a painting or an engraving. We know
the peculiar note of each just as we know the distinctive notes
of the birds, or the tones of a clarion, a flute, an organ, or the
human voice. But it is different with the verses of our modern
sonneteers: their tones are as greatly alike as those of our
street-organs; and unless previously warned by some ear-mark
of verbal peculiarity or crotchet of style or opinion, it is impos-
sible for us to assign them to their real authors.—There, Pro-
fessor, I have relieved my mind, and I resign the chair to you."
"Verily !" he exclaimed, when I came to a stop. "Here is
a transformation, here is an amazing development! My matter-
of-fact man of business suddenly converted into a luminous
censor of poets and poetry! My devotee of finance, my slave
of the ring, whose cunning manipulations now reveal and now
disperse into thin air riches such as alternately rejoiced and
mocked Aladdin, changed into a wrathful critic, brandishing
aloft a mighty tomahawk, and smiting the Amalekitish poets
hip and thigh with indiscriminate and resounding blows! And
yet, when I reflect, why should I be amazed? For do I not
know that in all my contact with men I have never found any
who are so quick to discern, and who so keenly relish beauty
Modern Sonnet-writers Defended.
267
or excellence of every kind, as our absorbed men of business?
Certainly I know that there are none who are so largely gifted
as they with the rare quality of common-sense, which, sharpen-
ed by hourly exercise, enables its possessor unerringly to detect
and puncture all shams, to remain unmoved by the shadows of
envy or the gildings of prepossession, to disregard the clamor-
ous ipse dixit of the world or 'Mrs. Grundy,' and to rate at
its just worth whatever is noble in thought or word or deed.
Yes, I am sure there is no class of men whose hearts are more
responsive than theirs to worth or merit in whatever forms
they may exhibit themselves, or whose judgment is so little
warped by envy on the one hand, or by undue partiality on the
other. They are our most disinterested and most wisely dis-
criminating critics, as well as the most judicious and most
munificent patrons of science and art and learning. If I were
a painter, an orator, a statesman, or a poet, I should prefer the
candid verdict of a clear-sighted, level-headed, and sagacious
business man to that of all the critics who have snarled, or
croaked, or panegyrized from the days of Zoilus till now. Do
not mistake me, then, old friend, if I indulge in a little harm-
less banter over your appearance in a new character. Indeed,
I am highly gratified by your criticism, and find in it much to
applaud, though I do not adopt all your conclusions. The er-
ror that mars your strictures is the indiscriminate sweep of
their censure. While your generalization wears a sufficient
semblance to truth to seem plausible, you disregard particulars,
which, if allowed the consideration they deserve, would mate-
rially modify your statement of the case. If it be true that
there is much sameness in the construction and use of the
sonnet by modern sonnet-writers, this is not peculiar to them,
and the observation applies with equal justice to sonneteers in
268
Afternoons with the Poets.
every age since the invention of the stanza. Doubtless, it is
true, that we should be easily able to discriminate the sonnets
of Davies and Donne from those of Spenser and Shakespeare,
or again from those of Daniel, and Drayton, and Drummond,
by the metaphysical, or speculative, or mystical cast of the
former; but so great is their general resemblance, that I doubt
if there are many practised critics who could distinguish those
of Davies from those of Donne, and accurately assign each to
its true source, unless they were previously familiar with their
paternity. So also of those by Daniel, Drayton, and Drum-
mond; while it would be impossible to confound their sonnets
with those of Davies and Donne, it would be exceedingly diffi-
cult, on a single hearing, to say which undoubtedly belongs to
Daniel, which to Drayton, and which to Drummond. The
reason for this is not far to seek: The differences between the
sonnets of these poets, being chiefly differences in particulars,
are discernible only after a close study and comparison of de-
tails; but the resemblances being due to the general tone or
prevailing air and effect, an immediate and controlling im-
pression of likeness is made upon the mind. You will find
that it is with poetry as with persons and faces. We are some-
times impressed, for instance, by the striking resemblance two
persons have for each other; but on a closer inspection we dis-
cover that this is due to some general trait which they have in
common-such as manner, voice, gait, attitude, or even trick
of gesture or fashion of dress, or some suggestive outline of
face, or figure, or general appearance, or expression; and we
finally perceive that in nearly every particular-such as size,
complexion, color of eyes or hair, shape of nose or mouth, in-
deed, in the form and expression of each separate feature, there
is a wide dissimilarity. As with persons, I repeat, so with
Individuality of Sonnet-writers.
269
poetry; there may often be a suggestive resemblance in gener-
als, while there is a marked unlikeness in particulars.—The oth-
er count in your indictment is equally defective; for while the
individuality of the great poets named by you is undeniable,
yet they had no exclusive monopoly of it. It belongs to no
particular age or men, but is the property of genius, and in
varying proportions of different grades of genius, in every age,
whether the endowment manifest itself in the soldier, the states-
man, the philosopher, or the poet; while a pippin-like similar-
ity and level uniformity are the inheritance of less highly gifted
mortals. If, then, the individuality of Spenser, Shakespeare,
Milton, and Wordsworth is so unmistakable that we cannot
fail to recognize the sonnets of each, and could not be misled
to credit either with the productions of the other, it is because
they were men of marked, distinctive, and pre-eminent genius;
and it will only be necessary to find men of equal genius in
our own day to find equal individuality. It may be readily
admitted that this parity of genius is not to be found; but
still we shall find genius of no mean grade, and that what was
true of these peerless men is also true of their less lavishly en-
dowed brethren of our own and recent times. No man of taste,
I think, or who possesses a fair share of poetic sensibility, would
be any more apt to confound the authorship of the sonnets of
Tennyson, Bryant, Longfellow, or Leigh Hunt, than he would
those of the great poets you have instanced; and the more
perfect the poetic taste and sensibility of the critic, the more
prompt he would be to distinguish the compositions of the
one from the other, and to assign them to their proper owners.
-But you will have an opportunity to apply the test, when we
resume our interrupted theme.
"I will now," he went on, "again take up the thread of my
270
Afternoons with the Poets.
verbosity. When I grouped the social and literary friends of
Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Lamb, in our last conver-
sation, I purposely omitted Leigh Hunt, the friend of the last
two, and warmly espoused by them in opposition to Words-
worth and Southey, who had few sympathies in common with
him, and contemptuously labelled his poetry as either 'cock-
ney' or 'satanic,' as it deviated into Hunt's own favorite gossip-
ing and chirrupy vein, or was built on the models of Byron or
Shelley. Moreover, although Hunt's life ran nearly contem-
poraneously with the lives of Wordsworth and Coleridge-he
was born only fourteen years later than they, and survived
them respectively nine and ten years-his style really belongs
to a later period than theirs, and the taste for his poetry is of
comparatively recent growth; so that he is better known, and
more of a popular favorite with the last and the present
generations, than he was in his own day. For these reasons I
have chosen to class him with our more recent or living poets.
The charm of Hunt's poetry is largely due to the variety and
superficial attractiveness of its ingredients; to his irrepressible
animal spirits; the unfailing gladness of heart and lightness of
fancy, that make his utterances seem the chatter of a 'boy
eternal;' the adroit tact with which he contrives to imbue his
art, even when most deliberate, with the appearance of natural-
ness and spontaneity; the tenderness, kindliness, and confiding
frankness that nestle under his garrulous chirpings; the fine
taste with which he discriminates, and the exquisite relish with
which he enjoys, and makes his readers enjoy, the bright and
the beautiful; the utter absence from his writings of any ves-
tige of jealousy, envy, spitefulness, or stinging rejoinder; his
rare faculty of word-painting, and the delicate nimbleness with
which he coins the veriest trifle into poetic jewels. All this
Leigh Hunt.
271
very attractive to an age which prefers the champagne of lit-
erature to its sound old port-lightness, sparkle, and vivacity
of fancy, to depth of thought and grand flights of imagina-
tion."
"I am reminded, Professor," I interrupted, "of a delicious.
morsel of Hunt's, which illustrates his dexterity in converting
trifles into gems. It has been singing in my ears since you
first mentioned his name, and is one of the most charming
trifles I know of. He himself calls it a 'rondeau ;' but if I
had the christening of it, I should name it an osculatory
ecstasy.' Listen to the gay old jongleur:
"Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me!'"
"Yes, that is Leigh Hunt all over," said the Professor, "and
is as sweet and brief a trifle as a kiss itself. How the jocund
old warbler must have relished the taste of a sweet woman's
lips! But now for his sonnets. Several of these contain
charming passages exhibiting his skill in word-painting. In
one he recounts the inducements he can hold out to an over-
tasked London friend to visit him in his little rural home, and
after speaking of-
"The charm
That stillness has for a world-fretted ear,'
he pictures his own simple fireside as rich in the refreshment
of this quiet charm :'
+
18
272
Afternoons with the Poets.
"""Tis now deep whispering all about me here,
With thousand tiny hushings, like a swarm
Of atom bees, or fairies in alarm,
Or noise of numerous bliss from distant sphere.
*
*
*
Nought heard through all our little, lull'd abode,
Save the crisp fire, or leaf of book turn'd o'er,
Or watch-dog, or the ring of frosty road.'
In another he describes the voice of a friend, who was a re-
nowned singer, as being
"Like a rill that slips
Over the sunny pebbles breathingly;'
and the playing of another friend, who was equally accom-
plished as a pianist, as chasing
"The notes with fluttering finger-tips,
Like fairies down a hill hurrying their trips.'
But we must not dally with these bouts of sweetness. Here
now are several of his sonnets, which I have selected from the
rest as reflecting his changeful moods, and as being good ex-
amples of his widely contrasted styles. The first is a comical
extravaganza addressed to fish, evidently thrown off in a mo-
ment of hilarious gayety, and, as I amuse myself by imagining,
after one of the congenial suppers which the Lambs-Charles
and his sister Mary-were in the habit of taking at Hunt's
house. I have italicized a line in it which bears indubitable
marks of Lamb's grotesquely quaint genius:
“You strange, astonish'd looking, angle-faced,
Dreary mouth'd, gaping wretches of the sea,
Gulping salt-water everlastingly,
Cold-blooded, though with red your blood be graced,
Sonnets by Leigh Hunt.
And mute, though dwellers in the roaring waste;
And you, all shapes beside, that fishy be,—
Some round, some flat, some long, all devilry,
Legless, unloving, infamously chaste:-
O scaly, slippery, wet, swift, staring wights,
What is't ye do? what life lead? eh, dull goggles?
How do ye vary your vile days and nights?
How pass your Sundays? Are ye still but joggles
In ceaseless wash? Still nought but gapes and bites,
And drinks, and stares, diversified with boggles ?'
273
I shall now read you something in a very different key. It is
'On the Nile,' and Hunt tells us that it was written at the
same time and place with the one that Shelley wrote on the
same theme. I think you will agree with me that it com-
pares well with Shelley's:
"It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
And times and things, as in that vision, seem
Keeping along it their eternal strands,-
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands
That roamed through the young world, the glory extreme
Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,
The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.
Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,
As of a world left empty of its throng,
And the void weighs on us; and then we wake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.'
Hunt also wrote a sonnet in companionship with Keats—or,
rather, at the same time and place, and on the same theme.
We have already had the one by Keats, the subject being 'The
Grasshopper and the Cricket:'
"
274
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon,
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass.
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;
Oh sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song-
In doors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.'
But incomparably the finest of his sonnets, and one that will
bear comparison with the best that have been written by any
of our modern poets, is the following, 'On a Lock of Milton's
Hair.' The subject seems to have lifted Hunt out of himself;
for in it he combines all his own native gentleness and tender-
ness with a gravity and loftiness that are unusual with him:
"It lies before me there, and my own breath
Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside
The living head I stood in honor'd pride,
Talking of lovely things that conquer death.
Perhaps he press'd it once, or underneath
Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed,
And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride
With their rich locks, or his own Delphic wreath.
There seems a love in hair, though it be dead!
It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread
Of our frail plant,-a blossom from the tree
Surviving the proud trunk :-as though it said
Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me
Behold affectionate eternity.'
201
Washington Allston.
275
"One of our own earliest post-colonial poets was Washing-
ton Allston, whose modest merits as a poet have been overshad-
owed by his greater fame as a painter. Comparatively little
known as a writer to the present generation of Americans,
there is yet much in his prose and poetical productions to
please the fancy and to elevate and refine the taste. Born in
1779, only seven years later than Coleridge, his earliest literary
efforts bore fruit when our poetical literature was at the low-
est stage of abasement and poverty; and they proved the wel-
come harbinger of the rich harvest of later days. Fascinating
in person-Washington Irving describes him as 'light and
graceful, with large blue eyes, and black silken hair, waving
and curling round a pale, expressive countenance, everything
about him bespoke the man of intellect and refinement '-hav-
ing rare conversational powers, and possessed of a sterling mo-
rality, delicate and graceful in his poetic fancies, which he had
the faculty of clothing in easy and musical verse, his literary
diversions were the play-spells of his vivid imagination during
his severer devotions to the art in which he won eminence;
and this combination of attractions early gained him the love
and admiration of Coleridge and Thorwaldsen, both of whom
he met in Europe in 1804, and who were then in the plenitude
of their splendid genius. As early as 1810, when Allston was
thirty-one, he was associated in literary companionship with.
Coleridge; and in that year one of his poems, 'America to
Great Britain,' was printed by Coleridge in his 'Sibylline
Leaves,' with a note stating that it was written by 'an Amer-
ican gentleman, a valued and dear friend,' and was inserted
'for its moral, no less than its poetic merit.' Their friendship
ended only with the life of Coleridge; and at his death All-
ston sent the following sonnet, in memoriam, to the poet's
६:
276
Afternoons with the Poets.
daughter, Sara. It is the only example of his in this stanza
which I am able to cite; but I shall be disappointed if its state-
ly harmonies do not move you to become better acquainted
with his other poetical productions, and especially with his im-
aginative prose-poem, 'Monaldi.' Here is the garland, still fresh
in beauty and fragrance, which was sent by the Artist to the
gifted daughter to be laid on the grave of her great father:
"And thou art gone-most lov'd, most honor'd Friend!
No-never more thy gentle voice shall blend
With air of earth its pure ideal tones,—
Binding in one, as with harmonious zones,
The heart and intellect. And I no more
Shall with thee gaze on that unfathom'd deep,
The human soul;-as when, push'd off the shore,
Thy mystic bark would thro' the darkness sweep,
Itself the while so bright! For oft we seem'd
As on some starless sea-all dark above,
All dark below-yet, onward as we drove,
To plough up light that ever round us stream'd.
But he who mourns is not as one bereft
Of all he lov'd :-Thy living Truths are left.'
"There are two other of our own early poets who came on
the stage a little later than Allston, and, like him, largely con-
tributed to refine and enrich our youthful literature. These
were Richard H. Dana (senior), born in 1787, and Joseph Rod-
man Drake, born in 1795; men of entirely different quality as
poets, and whose lives are as broadly contrasted as their writ-
ings, if we consider the bright brevity of Drake's career, and
the mild lustre of Dana's ripe harvest of years. Drake's 'Cul-
prit Fay,' and Dana's 'Buccaniers,' respectively their greatest
productions, are poems so opposite in their style and scope as
to have little in common beyond their musicalness, the copi-
1
Dana and Drake.
277
ousness of their vocabulary, the flexibility of their language,
and the versatility and boldness of their conceptions. Drake's
fancy is that of a nimble Ariel, revelling in minute details of
semi-ethereal transformations, and delighting to make unreality
seem real, and the impossible probable. Dana's imagination
has none of the frisky lightness and celerity of an Ariel, but,
combining something of the wild grandeur of a Salvator with
the imposing darkness of a Rembrandt, is intent upon transfer-
ring to his sombre canvas the effect of crime to beget more
appalling crime, to dry up the founts of human feeling in the
soul, to blast the springing shoots of tenderness and manliness.
and honor in the heart, to render the man more cruel as he be-
comes more callous, to banish him from the circle of human
sympathies and affections, and to separate him from the com-
panionship of his kind by the solitariness of his unparalleled
atrocities, till he becomes unendurable even to himself; and at
last, stung by the ghost of unbidden memories, preyed upon
by remorse, and maddened by spectral fears and terrors, he
plunges beneath the angry waves of black despair. A great-
er contrast is scarcely possible to be found than is afforded by
these two fine poems, or that denotes temperaments and capa-
bilities more unlike. This contrast, however, fades away in
their sonnets, which are remarkable for the subdued quiet of
their tones; as if the tricksy fancy of the creator of the
'Culprit Fay' and the sable-winged imagination of him of
the 'Buccanier' had each found rest and relief in sink-
ing their habitual notes to a pensive monotone. Could any-
thing, for instance, be gentler than this sonnet of Dana's 'To
a Garden Flower,' sent him by a lady—a sonnet that would
be fine, were it not for the weak anti-climax of its concluding
line?
278
Afternoons with the Poets.
"No, not in woods, nor fells, nor pastures wild,
Nor left alone to changeful nature's care,
You opened on the light and breathed the air;
But one with blush like thine, and look as mild
As dewy morn, with love all undefiled,
Chose out a kindly spot, and made thy bed
Safe from the cruel blast and heedless tread,
And watched thy birth, and took thee for her child.
And human hands solicitous have trained
Thy slender stalk, and eyes on thee have dwelt
Radiant with thought, and human feelings rained
Into thy bosom, e'en till thou hast felt
That through thy life a human virtue ran;
And now art come to greet thy fellow-man.'
Equally gentle, but with a tinge of sadness, is this of Drake's:
'Is thy heart weary of unfeeling men
And chilled with the world's ice? Then come with me,
And I will bring thee to a pleasant glen
Lovely and lonely. There we'll sit unviewed
By scoffing eye; and let our hearts beat free
With their own mutual throb. For wild and rude
The access is, and none will there intrude,
To poison our free thoughts and mar our solitude!
Such scenes move not their feelings-for they hold
No fellowship with nature's loneliness;
The frozen wave reflects not back the gold
And crimson flushes of the sunset hour;
The rock lies cold in sunshine-not the power
Of heaven's bright orb can clothe its barrenness.'
"Born ten years later than Dana, two years after Drake, and
three years after Bryant, William Motherwell was another of
those in the infancy of this century who found leisure, in the
midst of his devotion to another branch of his art-the repro-
William Motherwell.
279
duction of the songs and ballads of his native Scotland, and
of the sagas of the Scandinavian scalds to write a few son-
nets of no common merit. One of these, entitled 'The Poet's
Wish,' is a picture of an imaginary solitude that he craves;
the second is a real picture from nature of this solitude,
which, when found, proves to be the reverse of solitary; and
the third is an elegy to a 'Lone Thorn.' I will repeat them
in this order:
"O would that in some wild and winding glen
Where human footsteps ne'er did penetrate,
And from the haunts of base and selfish men
Remote, in dreamy loneness situate,
I had my dwelling: and within my ken
Nature disporting in fantastic form-
Asleep in green repose, and thundering in the storm!
Then mine should be a life of deep delight,-
Rare undulations of ecstatic musing;
Thoughts calm yet ever-varying, stream bedight
With flowers immortal of quick Fancy's choosing—
And like unto the ray of tremulous light,
Blent by the pale moon with the entranced water,
I'd wed thee, Solitude, dear Nature's first-born daughter.'
"This is no Solitude; these brown woods speak
In tones most musical—this limpid river
Chaunts a low song, to be forgotten never!—
These my beloved companions are so meek,
So soul-sustaining, I were crazed to seek
Again the tumult, the o'erpowering hum,
Which of the ever busy hiving city come―
Parting us from ourselves.-Still let us breathe
The heavenly air of contemplation here;
And with old trees, gray stones, and runnels clear,
Claim kindred and hold converse. He that seeth
280
Afternoons with the Poets.
Upon this vesper spot no loveliness,
Nor hears therein a voice of tenderness,
Calling him friend, Nature in vain would bless!'
"Beneath the scant shade of an aged thorn,
Silvered with age, and mossy with decay,
I stood, and there bethought me of its morn
Of verdant lustyhood, long passed away;
Of its meridian vigor, now outworn
By cankering years, and by the tempest's sway
Bared to the pitying glebe.-Companionless,
Stands the gray thorn complaining to the wind-
Of all the old wood's leafy loveliness
The sole memorial that lags behind;
Its compeers perished in their youthfulness,
Though round the earth their roots seem'd firmly twined:
How sad it is to be so anchored here
As to outlive one's mates, and die without a tear!'
"We now come, in the natural order of things, to our three
greatest living poets-Bryant (for I cannot yet 'make him
dead'), Tennyson, and Longfellow; and as an elaborate outline
of the features of their greatest poems, or a comparative estimate
of their poetry generally, would be a work of supererogation in
an age when they are all so universally known and read, I shall
confine what I have to say exclusively to their sonnets. Bry-
ant, the senior of this poetical triumvirate, was born in 1797;
Longfellow in 1807; and Tennyson, the junior of the three, in
1809: so that they may be said to belong exclusively to this
century, and are in a manner its outgrowth and representatives.
as it regards poetic inspiration and expression; although this
nineteenth century distinctiveness is less perceptible in their
sonnets than in their other poetical compositions. Of their
sonnets, it may be said, generally, that Tennyson's are more
Alfred Tennyson.
281
contemplative and introspective, and more imaginative than
Longfellow's; that Longfellow's are more graphic, richer in
pictorial effects, and more realistic in their descriptions and
portraitures than Tennyson's; and that Bryant's are as pictu-
resque, and even more minutely realistic than Longfellow's, as
ethereal and imaginative as Tennyson's, and more tender and
sympathetic than either. Tennyson's sonnets are more specifi-
cally confined to the realm of sentiment, reflection, and specu-
lation; Longfellow's to that of concrete objects-to man, and
the works or operations of nature; and Bryant's blend the
characteristics of both, exhibiting more warmth of human sym-
pathy in his sentiment than we find in Tennyson, and surround-
ing his bits of nature with a lovelier haze and an atmosphere of
softer radiance than we discover in Longfellow.
"And now, lest you should say of me as Goldsmith once
wittily said of an infinitely greater man—
'Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,
And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining,'
I will leave these 'pribbles and prabbles,' and go ahead with-
out further ado.-I am apt to class among the most character-
istic of Tennyson's sonnets, and in many respects among the
finest of them, these two composing an invocation to Divine
Love:
"Thou, from the first, unborn, undying love,
Albeit we gaze not on thy glories near,
Before the face of God didst breathe and move,
Though night and pain and ruin and death reign here.
Thou foldest, like a golden atmosphere,
The very throne of the eternal God:
Passing through thee the edicts of his fear
Are mellowed into music, borne abroad
282
Afternoons with the Poets.
By the loud winds, though they uprend the sea,
Even from its central deeps: thine empery
Is over all; thou wilt not brook eclipse;
Thou goest and returnest to His lips
Like lightning: thou dost ever brood above
The silence of all hearts, unutterable Love.'
To know thee is all wisdom, and old age
Is but to know thee: dimly we behold thee
Athwart the veils of evils which infold thee.
We beat upon our aching hearts in rage;
We
cry for thee; we deem the world thy tomb.
As dwellers in lone planets look upon
The mighty disk of their majestic sun,
Hollowed in awful chasms of wheeling gloom,
Making their day dim, so we gaze on thee.
Come, thou of many crowns, whiterobèd love,
Oh! rend the veil in twain: all men adore thee;
Heaven crieth after thee; earth waiteth for thee;
Breathe on thy wingèd throne, and it shall move
In music and in light o'er land and sea.'
There is another sonnet, quite the counterpart of these, in
which the laureate describes in a strain of melancholy, after
the manner of Petrarch, minus Petrarch's 'Petrarchisms,' the
disabling effects of hopeless human love. Several of its lines
and figures are finely conceived:
"Me my own fate to lasting sorrow doometh;
Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory:
Thy spirit, circled with a living glory,
In summer still a summer joy resumeth.
Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh,
Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary,
From an old garden where no flower bloometh,
One cypress on an island promontory.
Sonnets by Tennyson.
But yet my lonely spirit follows thine,
As round the rolling earth night follows day:
But yet thy lights on my horizon shine
Into my night, when thou art far away
I am so dark, alas! and thou so bright,
When we two meet there's never perfect light.'
283
In a very tender strain is an exquisite sonnet in which he de-
scribes his feelings on revisiting the place where he first told.
his love. It is one of the few instances of description to be
found in his sonnets:
"Check every outflash, every ruder sally
Of thought and speech; speak low, and give up wholly
Thy spirit to mild-minded melancholy;
This is the place. Through yonder poplar valley
Below the blue-green river windeth slowly:
But in the middle of the sombre valley
The crispèd waters whisper musically,
And all the haunted place is dark and holy.
The nightingale, with long and low preamble,
Warbled from yonder knoll of solemn larches,
And in and out the woodbine's flowery arches
The summer midges wove their wanton gambol,
And all the white-stemmed pinewood slept above—
When in this valley first I told my love.'
Two of his sonnets, addressed 'To a Coquette,' open in a strain
of gay vivacity, but insensibly glide from light sentimentality
into ethical or contemplative moralizings, and finally conclude
in tones of ill-suppressed cynicism. Can it be that these son-
nets have a secret history that would impart additional interest
to them if we could but unravel it? Whose was the 'dainty
hand,' we wonder, by which he was once 'caress'd or chidden,'
and who the 'slight coquette,' of whom he writes—
284
Afternoons with the Poets.
་
"My fancy made me for a moment blest
To find my heart so near the beauteous breast ?'
But I am quoting prematurely here are the sonnets to hint
their own story :—
"Caress'd or chidden by the dainty hand,
And singing airy trifles this or that,
Light Hope at Beauty's call would perch and stand,
And run thro' every change of sharp and flat:
And Fancy came and at her pillow sat,
When Sleep had bound her in his rosy band,
And chased away the still-recurring gnat,
And woke her with a lay from fairy land.
But now they live with Beauty less and less,
For Hope is other Hope and wanders far,
Nor cares to lisp in love's delicious creeds:
And Fancy watches in the wilderness,
Poor Fancy sadder than a single star,
That sets at twilight in a land of reeds.'
The form, the form alone is eloquent!
A nobler yearning never broke her rest
Than but to dance and sing, be gayly drest,
And win all eyes with all accomplishment:
Yet in the waltzing-circle as we went,
My fancy made me for a moment blest
To find my heart so near the beauteous breast
That once had power to rob it of content.
A moment came the tenderness of tears,
The phantom of a wish that once could move,
A ghost of passion that no smiles restore-
For ah! the slight coquette, she cannot love,
And if you kiss'd her feet a thousand years,
She still would take the praise, and care no more.'
I think you will agree with me that few of Tennyson's later
Sonnets by Tennyson.
285
sonnets compare in warmth, delicacy, and earnest sincerity of
meaning, with three, to which he has since attached slight value,
apparently because of his immaturity when they were written.
But, notwithstanding his low appreciation of them, they are
redolent with the bloom and buoyancy of youth; and the aspi-
rations to which the one I shall place last gave voice with the
frankness and vague largeness of expectation of youth, now
seem to have been almost prophetic. Written when he was
not yet twenty-four, as was natural, two of them are of the am-
atory kind, and among the most felicitous of that kind. I shall
conclude my citations from him with these three:
"O beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet!
How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs?
I only ask to sit beside thy feet.
Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes.
Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold
My arms about thee-scarcely dare to speak.
And nothing seems to me so wild and bold,
As with one kiss to touch thy blessèd cheek.
Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control
Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat
The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke,
The bare word KISS hath made my inner soul
To tremble like a lutestring, ere the note
Hath melted in the silence that it broke.'
"But were I loved, as I desire to be,
What is there in the great sphere of the earth,
And range of evil between death and birth,
That I should fear,—if I were loved by thee?
All the inner, all the outer world of pain
Clear love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine,
As I have heard that, somewhere in the main,
Fresh-water springs come up through bitter brine.
286
Afternoons with the Poets.
"Twere joy, not fear, clasped hand-in-hand with thee,
To wait for death-mute-careless of all ills,
Apart upon a mountain, though the surge
Of some new deluge from a thousand hills
Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge
Below us, as far on as eye could see.'
"Mine be the strength of spirit fierce and free,
Like some broad river rushing down alone,
With the selfsame impulse wherewith he was thrown
From his loud fount upon the echoing lea :-
Which with increasing might doth forward flee
By town, and tower, and hill, and cape, and isle,
And in the middle of the green salt sea
Keeps his blue waters fresh for many a mile.
Mine be the Power which ever to its sway
Will win the wise at once, and by degrees
May into uncongenial spirits flow;
Even as the great gulfstream of Florida
Floats far away into the Northern seas
The lavish growths of southern Mexico.'
"Longfellow wrote few weak sonnets, but I think his strong-
est are those which embody portraitures or characterizations
of illustrious men, or which revive associations connected with
them. From this class I select the following, worthy of Mil-
ton or Wordsworth. The first is a glimpse of Dante's passing
figure:
'Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom,
With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes,
Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise,
Like Farinata from his fiery tomb.
Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom;
Yet in thy heart what human sympathies,
What soft compassion glows, as in the skies
The tender stars their clouded lamps relume!
:
Henry W. Longfellow.
Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks,
By Fra Hilario in his diocese,
As up the convent-walls, in golden streaks,
The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease;
And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks,
Thy voice along the cloister whispers "Peace!"
287
Next, he gives us a glimpse of Chaucer in his hale old age at
Woodstock, surrounded by the rural sights and sounds he loved
so well, and engaged in transmuting them into golden verse:
"An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,
Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
Made beautiful with song; and as I read
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.'
In dark contrast with this cheerful picture of ripe years en-
joying well-won renown, is another of the prone form of the
youthful Keats, untimely dead:
"The young Endymion sleeps Endymion's sleep;
The shepherd-boy whose tale was left half told!
The solemn grove uplifts its shield of gold
To the red rising moon, and loud and deep
The nightingale is singing from the steep;
It is midsummer, but the air is cold;
Can it be death? Alas, beside the fold
19
288
Afternoons with the Poets.
A shepherd's pipe lies shattered near his sheep.
Lo! in the moonlight gleams a marble white,
On which I read: "Here lieth one whose name
And was this the meed
Was writ in water."
Of his sweet singing?
Rather let me write :
"The smoking flax before it burst to flame
Was quenched by death, and broken the bruised reed."
Nearly allied in kind to these portraitures are two finely poetic
characterizations of the writings of Shakespeare and Milton,
in which the artist, by a few brief and skilful touches of his
pencil, blends vision and allegory with reality-the imaginary
with the sensible and actual. This one, on Shakespeare, glows
with color, and is fairly alive with stir and movement:
"A vision as of crowded city streets,
With human life in endless overflow;
Thunder of thoroughfares; trumpets that blow
To battle; clamor, in obscure retreats,
Of sailors landed from their anchored fleets;
Tolling of bells in turrets, and below
Voices of children, and bright flowers that throw
O'er garden-walls their intermingled sweets!
This vision comes to me when I unfold
The volume of the Poet paramount,
Whom all the Muses loved, not one alone
Into his hands they put the lyre of gold,
And, crowned with sacred laurel at their fount,
Placed him as Musagetes on their throne.'
Do you detect the double suggestiveness of this fine sonnet:
how it reproduces Shakespeare's own actual daily life-busy,
bustling, crowded, and changeful, now in struggle and now in
repose, now jostled by rivals, now companioned and admired
by the great and noble, and now gilded by visions of immortal
71
Longfellow-Continued.
289
fame? And, again, how it recalls the mimic life of his magic
dramas; their thronging multitudes of men and women—
princes and nobles; churchmen and soldiers; sailors, tinkers,
tailors, and cobblers; knaves, peasants, fools, and villains—till
we seem to hear the resounding cries and laughter, jeers and
taunts, huzzas and tumults of his world in miniature, to be-
come spectators of the loves and hates and wars and plots of
its denizens, and to witness all the endless jumble of vicissitude
which touched their interests, or stirred their affections, or
roused their passions?—The sonnet on Milton has the same
feature of duplex suggestiveness, but more subtly exhibited:
"I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold
How the voluminous billows roll and run,
Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun
Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,
And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold
All its loose-flowing garments into one,
Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold.
So in majestic cadence rise and fall
The mighty undulations of thy song,
O sightless bard, England's Mæonides.
And ever and anon, high over all
Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.'
Few other of Longfellow's sonnets rise in all points to the high
excellence of those I have repeated; but among them are
many that are signally notable for the superlative beauty of
the thoughts they enshrine, the transparent clearness of their
language, and the liquid melody of their versification—if they
have any defect, it is their excess of sweetness, which sometimes
cloys upon the palate. We cannot stop, however, to inspect
290
Afternoons with the Poets.
them all; but before dismissing them, let me invite your atten-
tion to the last three of the series inscribed to 'Three Friends
of Mine,' which are among the tenderest and most beautiful
of his compositions in this stanza, and, as elegiac sonnets, have
the merit of true pathos and simple sincerity. Also, that you
may be able intelligently to compare his delineations and inter-
pretations of Nature with Bryant's sonnets on related themes,
do not fail to read his fine descriptions of Autumn,' "The
Harvest Moon,' 'A Summer Day by the Sea,' and 'The Tides.'
Finally, and above all do not overlook his exquisite sonnet on
'Venice,' the 'white swan of cities slumbering in her nest,' or
omit to compare the one 'To Sleep' with those on the same
theme already quoted from the elder poets, Sidney and Drum-
mond.
"Bryant's sonnets are so few that I could repeat them all
without wearying you; but as you are already familiar with
them, I shall merely specialize several in the line wherein he
excels all our modern poets, namely, the loving and reverent
worship and interpretation of Nature in her serenest moods. I
allude particularly to his sonnets on 'Midsummer,' 'October,'
and 'November;' and, as I read them, give attention to the
exceeding delicacy and minuteness of their detail coupled with
their breadth and largeness, and also to the warmth and sober
richness of their coloring. I have read them a hundred times,
but never without discovering some new beauty to be enjoyed,
or without marvelling at the power of dilatation and contrac-
tion of poetic vision, and the extraordinary poetic sensibility,
which have made descriptions so glowing and so true possible
to be transferred to words within a scope so limited. I re-
peat them, without further comment, in the order that I named
them :
Sonnets by Bryant.
"A power is on the earth and in the air,
From which the vital spirit shrinks afraid,
And shelters him in nooks of deepest shade,
From the hot steam and from the fiery glare.
Look forth upon the earth-her thousand plants
Are smitten; even the dark sun-loving maize
Faints in the field beneath the torrid blaze;
The herd beside the shaded fountain pants;
For life is driven from all the landscape brown;
The bird has sought his tree, the snake his den,
The trout floats dead in the hot stream, and men
Drop by the sun-stroke in the populous town:
As if the Day of Fire had dawned, and sent
Its deadly breath into the firmament.'
'Ay, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath,
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny South! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks,
And, dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh;
And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.'
"Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
291
292
Afternoons with the Poets.
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delights to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.'"
"Why is it, Professor," I here inquired, "that when I read
or listen to Bryant, I am always faintly reminded of Whittier;
or, to put it more exactly, why, when reading or hearing Whit-
tier, am I reminded of Bryant?"
"There is a nice distinction," he replied, "and an acute
though involuntary criticism, involved in the change of your
query from its original to its present form; for we are wont to
be reminded of the greater by the less, rather than of the less
by the greater. It would be natural to say, 'So-and-so reminds
me of Shakespeare,' or of Spenser, or Milton, or Raphael, or Leo-
nardo, or the like, but it would be absurd to say, 'Shakespeare
resembles So-and-so.' It is unnecessary to formulate the sim-
ple and obvious reasons for this. Bryant and Whittier belong
to different grades as artists, though both are pre-eminently gift-
ed with quick poetic sensibility, and the faculty of picturesque
poetic utterance. Bryant's imagination is the loftiest; his con-
ceptions are grander, his thoughts more exalted, his style purer,
his powers of generalization greater, his coloring firmer and
truer than Whittier's. Still, as you have observed, we are often
reminded insensibly of the former by the latter; and if we
search out the cause we shall find that it is mainly because of
their mutually clear and truthful interpretations of nature, their
faithfully minute delineations of some of her most winning
Bryant and Whittier Compared.
293
guises, and, above all, because of the reverence and love with
which they both habitually regard her and her Divine Author.
Whittier's literary plane is a lower and more familiar one than
Bryant's, but both were nourished in the same kindly, all-per-
vading atmosphere, wherein are engendered a quick sensibility
for, and genial sympathy with, whatsoever is good and pure and
beautiful—just as in the natural atmosphere, though in differ-
ing degrees at different altitudes, the same odors are exhaled,
the same images conveyed, the same sounds conducted, the
same undulations of light set in motion. Notwithstanding
their many common points of harmony, Whittier's sympathies
-though fine and noble-find a less pleasing and a less noble
form of expression than Bryant's. He habitually, and Bryant
never or rarely, subordinates the poet to the man; and he ob-
trudes his own peculiar notions or opinions, on subjects relig-
ious, political, social, and philanthropic, upon his poetical utter-
ances, and makes them important or ruling factors in some of
his finest poems. It is also to be said that he differs from
Bryant, very delightfully too sometimes, in making his poems.
vehicles for illustrating the familiar speech and lives and feel-
ings of the men and women belonging to those simple-hearted
folk in the lower and middle walks of life, whom President
Lincoln was used to call 'plain people.' In these last, Whittier
best displays his powers and diffuses his bosky sweetness; but
in the class first named a rigid austerity dominates, and poetry
is only a garb contrived to cloak the writer's ethics.—It is sin-
gular, because it is unusual with poets generally, that Whit-
tier's sonnets, few though they be, are largely colored by this
injection of his idiosyncrasies and crotchets; and it is not to be
wondered at that, in consequence, they are among the least at-
tractive and least poetical of his writings. The two that I shall
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repeat, though far from being fair examples of his genius, are
true representatives of the style of his sonnets-the first, on
'Forgiveness,' being a specimen in his more genial, and the
other, on 'Leggett's Monument,' in his more rigid manner:
"My heart was heavy, for its trust had been
Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;
So, turning gloomily from my fellow-men,
One summer Sabbath-day I strolled among
The green mounds of the village burial-place;
Where, pondering how all human love and hate
Find one sad level; and how, soon or late,
Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,
And cold hands folded over a still heart,
Pass the green threshold of our common grave,
Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,
Awed for myself, and pitying my race,
Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,
Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave !'
"Yes,-pile the marble o'er him. It is well
That ye who mocked him in his long stern strife,
And planted in the pathway of his life
The ploughshares of your hatred hot from hell,
Who clamored down the bold reformer when
He pleaded for his captive fellow-men,
Who spurned him in the market-place, and sought
Within thy walls, St. Tammany, to bind
In party chains the free and honest thought,
The angel utterance of an upright mind,
Well is it now that o'er his grave ye raise
The stony tribute of your tardy praise,
For not alone that pile shall tell to Fame
Of the brave heart beneath, but of the builders' shame!'
.
Thomas Hood.
295
"From Bryant and Whittier to Tom Hood will seem a vio-
lent transition, if you share the popular notion that Hood was
a humorist only; and you will not be prepared to hear that he
was the author of some of our finest modern sonnets. And
yet his poems, 'The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies,' 'Hero
and Leander,' 'The Bridge of Sighs,' 'The Song of the Shirt,'
and many of his songs and ballads, should have revealed his
true capabilities as a poet to you. Even in his most unbridled
comic compositions, Hood's apparently reckless mirthfulness
often veils the truest tenderness and intensest feeling; and be-
neath his irony and laughter we detect the tones of sympathy
and pity. His humor was undoubted, and his wit spontaneous
and unadulterate; but very often his mirth was a passionate
cry wrung from a heart suffering from anguish of mind and
body—a cry that was none the less bitter because it simulated
laughter. Nothing, however, could quench his sweetness of
mind, or permanently eclipse its sunniness: too manly to pa-
rade his anxieties and suffering in order to excite commisera-
tion, too honest to conceal them altogether, and too healthy-
minded to feed on his own griefs, his anguish, instead of mak-
ing him callous, or morbid, or selfish, softened his heart with
tenderness for all who suffered; and he sought and found re-
lief from his own pangs by awakening sympathy for others.
His pathos, his irony, his humor, his power of concentrated
tragic delineation, and his exquisitely sensitive sense of the
beautiful, were all utilized by him to inspire the thoughtful, and
even the careless, with pity for the suffering, the overburdened,
the weak, and the unfortunate; and in his hand his peculiar
gifts became arrows, that penetrated the hearts of thousands
who would have been insensible to any other appeals. Who-
ever, then, reads Hood solely for his unlimited jest and fun,
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sees and understands one side only of his nature, and knows
nothing of the gracefulness of his genius-its fine pathos, its
manly tenderness, its subtle perceptions of nature in the heart
and in the creation lying outside of it.-His sonnets are truly
representative of the man: some, but they the least numerous,
are in his unbridled comic vein; but far the larger proportion
belong to the family of genuine poesy. One of these last,
composed while he was travelling abroad an exile in search of
health, is an apostrophe to 'The Ocean,' last link, as he calls it,
between his native land and himself, and is written in a strain
of exalted but tender patriotism; another is a graphic ideal
impersonation of 'Lear;' another, a brilliant contrast between
'False Poets and True;' several are charming tributes of love
addressed to his wife; and there are a number on occasional
themes, prompted by friendship or by the suggestions of his
versatile fancy. I think those that follow are fair specimens.
of his style. The first is entitled 'A Sonnet to a Sonnet,' in
which, when referring to the origin of the sonnet in England,
under the appellation 'poet-knight,' he evidently alludes to
the Earl of Surrey:
'Rare composition of a poet-knight,
Most chivalrous amongst chivalric men,
Distinguished for a polish'd lance and pen
In tuneful contest and in tourney-fight;
Lustrous in scholarship, in honor bright,
Accomplish'd in all graces current then,
Humane as any in historic ken,
Brave, handsome, noble, affable, polite;
Most courteous to that race become of late
So fiercely scornful of all kind advance,
Rude, bitter, coarse, implacable in hate,
To Albion, plotting ever her mischance,—
Sonnets by Hood.
Alas, fair verse! how false and out of date
Thy phrase "sweet enemy" applied to France!'
297
"These two that I shall now repeat are companion sonnets,
embodying the opposite trains of reflection that are excited by
the sight, first, of a child sleeping, and then of the same child
awakened:
"Oh, 'tis a touching thing to make one weep,-
A tender infant with its curtain'd eye,
Breathing as it would neither live nor die
With that unchanging countenance of sleep!
As if its silent dream, serene and deep,
Had lined its slumber with a still blue sky,
So that the passive cheeks unconscious lie
With no more life than roses—just to keep
The blushes warm, and the mild, odorous breath.
O blossom boy! so calm is thy repose,
So sweet a compromise of life and death,
'Tis pity those fair buds should e'er unclose
For memory to stain their inward leaf,
Tinging thy dreams with unacquainted grief.'
"Thine eyelids slept so beauteously, I deem'd
No eyes could wake so beautiful as they:
Thy rosy cheeks in such still slumbers lay,
I loved their peacefulness, nor ever dream'd
Of dimples; for those parted lips so seem'd,
I never thought a smile could sweetlier play,
Nor that so graceful life could chase away
Thy graceful death,―till those blue eyes upbeam'd.
Now slumber lies in dimpled eddies drown'd,
And roses bloom more rosily for joy,
And odorous silence ripens into sound,
And fingers move to sound.-All-beauteous boy!
How thou dost waken into smiles, and prove,
If not more lovely, thou art more like Love!'
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Afternoons with the Poets.
The sonnets following conclude my selections from Hood.
They were written by him in a volume of Shakespeare, the
final one having been suggested by the Great Enchanter's
'Ariel :'
"How bravely Autumn paints upon the sky
The gorgeous fame of summer which is fled
Hues of all flowers that in their ashes lie,
Trophied in that fair light whereon they fed,
Tulip, and hyacinth, and sweet rose red,—
Like exhalations from the leafy mould,
Look here how honor glorifies the dead,
And warms their scutcheons with a glance of gold !—
Such is the memory of poets old,
Who on Parnassus' hill have bloom'd elate;
Now they are laid under their marbles cold,
And turn'd to clay, whereof they were create;
But God Apollo hath them all enroll'd
And blazoned on the very clouds of fate!'
"Most delicate Ariel! submissive thing,
Won by the mind's high magic to its hest,-
Invisible embassy, or secret guest,-
Weighing the light air on a lighter wing;-
Whether into the midnight moon, to bring
Illuminate visions to the eye of rest,-
Or rich romances from the florid West,-
Or to the sea, for mystic whispering,—
Still by thy charm'd allegiance to the will,
The fruitful wishes prosper in the brain,
As by the fingering of fairy skill,—
Moonlight, and waters, and soft music's strain,
Odors, and blooms, and my Miranda's smile,
Making this dull world an enchanted isle.'
"But see! while I have dallied so long with these pleasant
1
Aubrey de Vere.
299
companions, the sun has sunk below the tree-tops, and I find
myself in like case with him
"'That left half-told
The story of Cambuscan bold,'
and therefore, notwithstanding the gracefulness and facility ex-
hibited in the sonnets of many of our more recent poets, it will
be impossible to give examples in detail of their skill, in the
remnant of the afternoon that is left us. I must pass in si-
lence over all save a few, whom I shall present as representa-
tives of our modern workmanship.-Here, as the first of these,
are two by Aubrey de Vere, which are interesting for the asso-
ciations they revive of Wordsworth's sonnets on 'The River
Duddon,' described in a previous conversation. They are in-
scribed to Wordsworth, ‘On Visiting the Duddon :'
"So long as Duddon 'twixt his cloud-girt walls
Thridding the woody chambers of the hills
Warbles from vaulted grot and pebbled halls
Welcome or farewell to the meadow rills;
So long as linnets chant low madrigals
Near that brown nook the laborer whistling tills,
Or the late-reddening apple forms and falls,
Mid dewy brakes the autumnal redbreast thrills,
666
So long, last poet of the great old race,
Shall thy broad song through England's bosom roll,
A river singing anthems in its place,
And be to later England as a soul.
Glory to Him who made thee, and increase
To them that hear thy word, of love and peace!'
"When first that precinct sacrosanct I trod
Autumn was there, but Autumn just begun;
Fronting the portals of a sinking sun,
The queen of quietude in vapor stood,
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Her sceptre o'er the dimly crimsoned wood
Resting in light. The year's great work was done;
Summer had vanished, and repinings none
Troubled the pulse of thoughtful gratitude.
Wordsworth! the autumn of our English song
Art thou; 'twas thine our vesper psalms to sing :
Chaucer sang matins; sweet his note and strong,
His singing-robe the green, white garb of Spring:
Thou like the dying year art rightly stoled,—
Pontific purple and dark harvest gold.'
I now turn to James Russell Lowell's sonnets, in further illustra-
tion of the style of our modern writers. They were written in
early manhood, and in an accompanying poem he calls them-
"The firstlings of my muse,
Poor windfalls of unripe experience,
Young buds plucked hastily by childish hands.'
The two that I present will excite a desire to become better
acquainted with their companions, and also regret that strains
begun so worthily should have been renewed so rarely in ma-
turer years:
"I ask not for those thoughts, that sudden leap
From being's sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,
With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken
And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;
Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep,
Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise,
Which, by the toil of gathering energies,
Their upward way into clear sunshine keep,
Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences,
Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green
Into a pleasant island in the seas,
Where, mid tall palms, the cane-roofed home is seen,
Lowell and Stedman.
And wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour,
Hearing the leaves and loving God's dear power.'
"I grieve not that ripe Knowledge takes away
The charm that Nature to my childhood wore,
For, with that insight, cometh, day by day,
A greater bliss than wonder was before;
The real doth not clip the poet's wings,—
To win the secret of a weed's plain heart
Reveals some clew to spiritual things,
And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art:
Flowers are not flowers unto the poet's eyes,
Their beauty thrills him by an inward sense;
He knows that outward seemings are but lies,
Or, at the most, but earthly shadows, whence
The soul that looks within for truth may guess
The presence of some wondrous heavenliness.'
301
Stedman's sonnets are fewer still than Lowell's; but as the
result, perhaps, of a longer and more exacting study of the art
before their composition, they are finished with greater elabo-
ration than Lowell's. There is also apparent in them a greater
share of feeling. Here is a specimen on 'A Mother's Picture,'
which has been chosen less for the perfection of its finish than
for the tender blending of filial with paternal love, which makes
every line glisten with its sweet dew:
"She seemed an angel to our infant eyes!
Once, when the glorifying moon revealed
Her who at evening by our pillow kneeled,—
Soft-voiced and golden-haired, from holy skies
Flown to her loves on wings of Paradise,—
We looked to see the pinions half concealed.
The Tuscan vines and olives will not yield
Her back to me, who loved her in this wise,
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Afternoons with the Poets.
i
:
And since have little known her, but have grown
To see another mother, tenderly
Watch over sleeping children of my own.
Perchance the years have changed her: yet alone
This picture lingers; still she seems to me
The fair young angel of my infancy.'
Belonging to a less emotional range of sentiment are two son-
nets by Matthew Arnold, inspired by characteristic incidents in
the life of a great and teeming city: the first being entitled
'East London;' and its companion, ' West London :'
"""Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green,
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited ;
I met a preacher there I knew, and said,
"Ill and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene ?"
"Bravely!" said he; "for I of late have been
Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread."
O human soul! as long as thou canst so
Set up a mark of everlasting light,
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,
To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam,
Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.'
"Crouched on the pavement close by Belgrave Square,
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some laboring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Passed opposite; she touched her girl, who hied
Across and begged, and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Aldrich and Moir.
Or sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succor which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.'
303
Now let us turn from the city and inhale a breath of strong,
fresh country air. Here is a delicious bit of New England
still-life, rich with autumnal colors and fragrance, on "Barber-
ries,' by Thomas Bailey Aldrich :
"In scarlet clusters o'er the gray stone wall
The barberries lean in thin autumnal air:
Just when the fields and garden-plots are bare,
And ere the green leaf takes the tint of fall,
They come, to make the eye a festival!
Along the road, for miles, their torches flare,
Ah, if your deep-sea coral were but rare
(The damask rose might envy it withal),
What bards had sung your praises long ago,
Called you fine names in honey-worded books,—
The rosy tramps of turnpike and of lane,
September's blushes, Ceres' lips aglow,
Little Red Ridinghoods,—for your sweet looks!
But your plebeian beauty is in vain.'
Or if you relish a scent of the heather, a little laden down and
robbed of its freshness by the whiff from the mould of vener-
able old-world antiquity that accompanies it, here are two fine
sonnets by David Macbeth Moir; the first being a wide view
of hill and lake and quiet farmsteads in Scotland, and the other
a glimpse of the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey:
Receded hills afar of softened blue,
Tall bowering trees, through which the sunbeams shoot
Down to the waveless lake, birds never mute,
And wild-flowers all around of every hue,-
Sure 'tis a lovely scene. There, knee-deep stand,
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Afternoons with the Poets.
Safe from the fierce sun, the o'ershadowed kine,
And to the left, where cultured fields expand,
'Mid tufts of scented thorn the sheep recline.
Lone quiet farmsteads, haunts that ever please,
O, how inviting to the traveller's eye
Ye rise on yonder uplands, 'mid your trees
Of shade and shelter! Every sound from these
Is eloquent of peace, in earth and sky,
And pastoral beauty, and Arcadian ease.'
Beneath, Tweed murmured amid the forests green:
And through thy beech-tree and laburnum boughs,
A solemn ruin, lovely in repose,
Dryburgh! thine ivied walls were grayly seen:
Thy court is now a garden, where the flowers
Expand in silent beauty, and the bird,
Flitting from arch to arch, alone is heard
To cheer with song the melancholy bowers.
Yet did a solemn pleasure fill the soul,
As through thy shadowy cloistral cells we trode,
To think, hoar pile! that once thou wert the abode
Of men, who could to solitude control
Their hopes,-yea! from ambition's pathways stole,
To give their whole lives blamelessly to God!'
In two highly poetic sonnets by Robert Buchanan, describing
the 'Motion of the Mists' over Loch Coruisk, we have another
and peculiar aspect of Scottish scenery:
"Here by the sunless lake there is no air,
Yet with how ceaseless motion, like a shower
Flowing and fading, do the high mists lower
Amid the gorges of the mountains bare.
Some weary breathing never ceases there,—
The barren peaks can feel it hour by hour;
Buchanan and Alford.
The purple depths are darkened by its power;
A soundless breath, a trouble all things share
That feel it come and go. See! onward swim
The ghostly mists, from silent land to land,
From gulf to gulf; now the whole air grows dim,—
Like living men, darkling a space, they stand.
But lo! a sunbeam, like a cherubim,
Scatters them onward with a flaming brand.'
305
"I think this is the very stillest place
On all God's earth, and yet no rest is here.
The vapors mirrored in the black loch's face
Drift on like frantic shapes and disappear;
A never-ceasing murmur in mine ear
Tells me of waters wild that flow and flow.
There is no rest at all afar or near,
Only a sense of things that moan and go.
And lo! the still small life these limbs contain
I feel flows on like those, restless and proud;
Before that breathing naught within my brain
Pauses, but all drifts on like mist and cloud;
Only the bald peaks and the stones remain,
Frozen before thee, desolate and bowed.'
A number of fine sonnets were written by the late Rev. Henry
Alford, principally descriptive of spots in England invested by
a historic or legendary halo. One of the choicest of these, on
'Glastonbury,' has an agreeable admixture of nature and ro-
mance, at once placing us in the midst of the present, and car-
rying us back to the days of Arthur and chivalry:
"On thy green marge, thou vale of Avalon,
Not for that thou art crowned with ancient towers
And shafts and clustered pillars many an one,
Love I to dream away the sunny hours;
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Afternoons with the Poets.
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Not for that here in charmed slumber lie
The holy relics of that British king
Who was the flower of knightly chivalry,
Do I stand blest past power of uttering;—
But for that on thy cowslip-sprinkled sod
Alit of old the olive-bearing bird,
Meek messenger of purchased peace with God;
And the first hymns that Britain ever heard
Arose, the low preluding melodies
To the sweetest anthem that hath reached the skies.""
"I have waited expectantly, Professor," I here interrupted,
to hear some examples from Sydney Dobell and Edgar A. Poe.
Do you mean to pass them over in silence? Portions of Dobell's
'The Roman' have greatly impressed me, particularly its songs
and descriptive and recitative passages; and I have inferred
from the melody of their versification and the unwavering
unity of their design and treatment that his sonnets must be
of a high order. Have you any specimens of his style?"
(6
'Yes; but I fear they will disappoint your expectations.
Dobell's sonnets are forcible and coherent enough, but are sel-
dom poetical. Their coherence is that of statement and asser-
tion merely, far different from the poetic unity whose office it
is, as a poet yet to be cited tells us, to fuse many modes of
light in one bright thought. His forcibleness, too, is more in
the manner of the utterance than in its matter. The language
of his sonnets is bold, resonant, stilted-the sentiments literal
and prosaic, inspired by the will rather than by the fancy or
imagination. The least tumid of them are two which he in-
scribed 'To America;' and I shall repeat them as reflecting his
general treatment of this stanza with sufficient accuracy :
"Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns.
But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?
Sydney Dobell.
Not that our sires did love in years gone by,
When all the Pilgrim fathers were little sons
In merrie homes of Englande? Back, and see
Thy satchelled ancestor! Behold, he runs
To mine, and clasped, they tread the equal lea
To the same village-school, where side by side
They spell "Our Father." Hard by, the twin-pride
Of that gray hall whose ancient oriel gleams
Thro' yon baronial pines, with looks of light
Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.
Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams
His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?'
"Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us! Oh ye
Who north or south, on east or western land,
Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,
Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God
For God; Oh ye who in eternal youth
Speak with a living and creative flood
This universal English, and do stand
Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand
Heroic utterance-parted, yet a whole,
Far, yet unsevered,-children brave and free
Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be
Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare's soul,
Sublime as Milton's unmemorial theme,
And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream.'
307
The latter half of this last sonnet recalls, and is a weak echo
of that grand sonnet of Wordsworth, in which occur the lines-
“We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
That Milton held.'
None of Poe's sonnets are specially noteworthy. Here is one,
•
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Afternoons with the Poets.
'To Silence,' which is as characteristic of his manner as any of
the few that he has left:
"There are some qualities—some incorporate things,
That have a double life, which thus is made
A type of that twin entity which springs
From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.
There is a two-fold Silence-sea and shore-
Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,
Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,
Some human memories and tearful lore,
Render him terrorless: his name 's "No More."
He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!
No power hath he of evil in himself;
But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)
Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,
That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod
No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!"
“Professor,” I said, "I have here a sonnet by Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, on 'Joseph Warren,' which I admire greatly for
its earnestness of tone, and for the graceful ingenuity of its.
double tribute to the hero-patriot and to the healing art, of
which both the poet and patriot were devotees.”
"Read it, my lad, read it," he exclaimed. "I remember it
well, and like its poetry and its patriotism."
"I wish the ‘Autocrat' were here in person, with his genial
presence and no less genial voice, to read it for us in his own
genial fashion. Perhaps, if you close your eyes, you may fan-
cy it to be so while I read:
"Trained in the holy art whose lifted shield
Wards off the darts a never-slumbering foe,
By hearth and wayside lurking, waits to throw,
Oppression taught his helpful arm to wield
Holmes and Turner.
The slayer's weapon; on the murderous field
The fiery bolt he challenged laid him low,
Seeking its noblest victim. Even so
The charter of a nation must be sealed!
The healer's brow the healer's honor crowned,
From lowliest duty, called to loftiest deed;
Living, the oak-leaf wreath his temples bound,
Dying, the conqueror's laurel was his meed,
Last on the broken rampart's turf to bleed
Where Freedom's victory in defeat was found.'"
309
"My budget is far from being exhausted," resumed the Pro-
fessor, when I had ceased; "but, unfortunately, it is otherwise
with the day. We have yet time, however, for a fine sonnet,
entitled 'The Sea Shell and the Sonneteer,' by Charles Tenny-
son Turner, a half-brother, I believe, of the Laureate. It is an
exquisite specimen of true art:
"Fair Ocean-shell! The poet's art is weak
To utter all thy rich variety;
How thou dost shame him, when he tries to speak,
And tell his ear the rapture of his eye!
I can not paint, as very truth requires,
The gold-green gleam that o'er thy surface rolls,
Nor follow up with words thy flying fires,
Where'er the startled rose-light wakes and moves;
O! why perplex with all thy countless hues,
The single-hearted sonnet? Fare thee well!
I give thee up to some gay lyric muse,
As fitful as thyself, thy tale to tell;
The simple sonnet can not do thee right,
Nor fuse in one bright thought thy many modes of light.""
As the Professor closed the last long resounding line of this
beautiful sonnet, the stars were coming out silently, one by
one, in the slowly darkening sky, first and brightest of them,
310
Afternoons with the Poets.
"in the painted oriel of the West," being the Star of Evening.
When the brilliant planet caught his eye, he exclaimed, in a
transport of rapturous delight:
"How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain,
Breaks the serene of heaven:
How beautiful is night!'
"How beautiful, indeed," he went on, "and how full of mys-
tery it must have seemed to Adam when it first fell on the
earth, shutting out its beauty, but revealing to his wondering.
gaze the hitherto unseen stars and all the shining frame of
heaven. So thought Blanco White, when he wrote the sonnet
which Leigh Hunt. tells us 'Coleridge pronounced to be the
best in the English language,' and with whose hymn-like tones
we will now bring our last afternoon with the poets to a fitting
close:
"Mysterious Night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,
Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet, 'neath the curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame,
Hesperus, with the host of heaven, came,
And, lo! creation widened in Man's view.
Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
While fly, and leaf, and insect lay revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind!
Why do we then shun Death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ?'"
Index.
A.
Album, lines on the, by Charles Lamb, 242.
Album Sonnets, by Charles Lamb, 241, 242.
Aldrich, Thomas B., sonnet by, 303.
Alford, Henry, sonnet by, 305.
Allston, Washington, notice of early life of, 275; his literary companion-
ship with Coleridge, 275; sonnet by, to memory of Coleridge, 276.
Amatory sonnets and poetry by women, character of, 263–265.
Amoretti, Edmund Spenser's, 55.
Ancients, sonnet not known to, 12.
Apostolical and poetical succession, similarity between, 42.
Arcadia, the, Sir Philip Sidney's, 51..
Arnold, Matthew, sonnets by, 302.
Astrophel and Stella, Sir Philip Sidney's, 52.
B.
Barry Cornwall, see Procter.
Barton, Bernard, character of his poetry, 247; sonnets by, 248.
Basilicon Doron, the, purity of style of, 120-122.
Beaumont and Fletcher, 82.
Beaumont, Francis, character of his sonnets, 82.
Beaumont, Sir John, 85.
Bell-ringing, Ben Jonson's simile for, 9.
Blank Verse, the first English, 29; second English tragedy in, 44.
Boleyn, Anne, Sir Francis Wyatt's sonnet to, 28, 33.
Boleyn, George (Lord Rochford), 44.
312
Index.
Bowles, William Lisle, influence of sonnets of, 180-183; his estimate of his
own sonnets, 183; account of his sonnets, 183, 184; specimens of his
sonnets, 184-189.
Browne, William, lines of, on Drayton, 104; sonnet by, 141.
Bryan, Sir Francis, 44.
Bryant, William Cullen, sonnets of, compared with Tennyson's and Long-
fellow's, 280, 281; specimens of his sonnets, 290, 291; his poetry and
Whittier's compared, 292, 293.
Brydges, Sir Egerton, his estimate of Samuel Daniel, 102.
Buchanan, Robert, sonnets by, 304, 305.
Burns, Robert, sonnet by, 222.
Byron, Lord, quality of his sonnets, 220; sonnets by, 220, 221.
Campbell, Thomas, 222.
C.
Carew, Thomas, his poetical rank and specimens of sonnets, 132, 133:
Cary, Henry F., his versions of Italian sonnets, 13, 18, 19; sonnets by, 249–
251.
Castara, William Habington's, 148–153.
Chapman, George, ranked with Shakespeare by some contemporaries, 79 ;
his sonnets chiefly panegyrical, 82; criticism of his poetical writings,
91-93; the dedicatory prefixes of his sonnets, 93-95; synoptical account
of his sonnets, 93-98; influence of his translation of Homer on later
poets, 97; specimens of his sonnets, 97-99.
Chaucer, Geoffrey, familiarity of, with Petrarch's poems, 25; introduced
the heroic measure to England, 27; relation of his Troilus and Creseide
to sonnet, 26, 27; resemblance of his seven-line stanza to the Proven-
çal, 26; state of English poetry between, and Spenser, 42.
Coleridge, S. T., his criticism of Petrarch's sonnets, 21; his estimate of
Shakespeare's sonnets, 61; his theory of use of masculine form in
Shakespeare's sonnets, 68; his estimate of Chapman's Homer, 97; criti-
cism of Daniel's poetry, 101; his opinion as to George Herbert's poetical
merit, 143; his remarks on Herbert's sonnet the "Bosom Sin," 146;
influence of Bowles's sonnets on, 180-183; criticism of his sonnets,
with specimens, 216-220; his estimate of Charles Lloyd's sonnets,
246.
Index.
313
Collins, William, 171, 173.
Comedy, first writers of English, 44.
Cowley, Abraham, 160.
Cowper, William, outline of his sonnets, 176, 177; sonnets by, 177.
D.
Dana, Richard H. (Senior), his “Buccaniers” and Drake's "Culprit Fay"
contrasted, 276, 277; sonnet by, 278.
Daniel, Samuel, ranked with Shakespeare by some contemporaries, 79; as-
sisted in perfecting the sonnet, 82; literary rank of, 100-102; resem-
blance between his poetic style and Wordsworth's, 101; account of his
sonnets, 102; examples of his sonnets, 103, 104; compared with Dray-
ton, 107, 108.
Dante, relation of, to early sonnet, 14; extent of his use of sonnet, 17;
specimens of his sonnets, 18, 19.
Davenant, Sir William, 147.
Davies, Sir John, remarks on his "Nosce Teipsum," 108-110; specimens of
his sonnets, 110, 111; raillery at expense of, 115.
Death, Raleigh's apostrophe to, 127.
Defence of Poesy, Sir Philip Sidney's, 51.
De Vere, Aubrey, sonnets by, 299, 300.
Diamond, compared to sonnet, 9, 12, 15, 83.
Digby, Sir Kenelm, Ben Jonson's sonnet to sons of, 88.
Digressions, on, 80, 81.
Dobell, Sydney, his poem "The Roman," 306; character of his sonnets,
306; sonnets by, 307.
Donne, John, criticism of his poetry, 123, 124; outline of his sonnets, 124,
125; sonnets by, 125.
Don Quixote, anecdote from, 157–159.
Drake, Joseph Rodman, his "Culprit Fay" and the "Buccaniers " con-
trasted, 276, 277; sonnet by, 278.
Drama, effect of the rise of, in England, on sonnet writing, 82.
Drayton, Michael, instrumental in perfecting the sonnet, 82; lines by, on
Daniel, 101; William Browne's lines on, 104; his "Nymphidia" and
"Poly-Olbion," 105, 106; account of his sonnets, with specimens, 106,
107; compared with Daniel, 107, 108.
314
Index.
Drummond, William, instrumental in perfecting sonnet, 82; estimate of
his sonnets, 128; sonnets by, 130, 131.
Dryden, John, 160.
E.
Elegy on Wyatt by Surrey, 31.
"Elia " in love, see Charles Lamb.
Elizabethan Era, calibre of men of, 77, 78; survival of poets of, to later
era, 147, 148.
England, introduction of sonnet into, 25.
English literature, first use of heroic measure in, 27; influence of early
sonnets on, 36, 43.
Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser's, 55.
F.
Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, Tusser's, 44.
Fletcher, Giles and Phineas, 137.
Fletcher, John, 82.
Ford, John, 82.
G.
Gascoigne, George, 44.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 171, 172.
Gray, Thomas, poetry of, compared with that of earlier school, 171;
by, and criticism of it by Wordsworth and Coleridge, 172–176.
Greene, Robert, 79.
Guittone, Fra, sonnet by, 13.
sonnet
H.
Habington, William, instrumental in perfecting early sonnet, 82;
character
of his poetry, 148; outline of his sonnets, 148-150; sonnets by, 150-153.
Hallam, Henry, his remarks on Daniel, 100, 101; on Drayton, 105; on Sir
John Davies, 109; on Drummond and structure of true sonnet, 128, 129;
on Bowles's sonnets, 182.
Hawkins, Sir Thomas, on Ben Jonson's "Plays," 85, 86.
Hazlitt, William, on Drummond's sonnets, 128.
Index.
315
Hemans, Mrs., account of her sonnets, with specimens, 255–259.
Henry the Eighth, manuscript sonnets of, 46.
Herbert, George, religious tone of poetry of, 137, 142; synoptical outline
of his sonnets, 143; sonnets by, 144–146.
Heroic measure, first use of, in England, 270.
Herrick, Robert, critical remarks on poetry of, 133, 134; sonnets by, 134–
136.
Heywood, John, 44.
Holmes, Oliver W., sonnet by, 308, 309.
Hood, Thomas, peculiarity of his humor, 295; account of his sonnets, with
specimens, 296–298.
Homer, Chapman's, the dedicatory sonnets to, 91–94, 96; influence of on
later poets, 97; Coleridge on, 97.
Hopkins, see Sternhold and Hopkins.
Hunt, Leigh, remarks on his poetry, 270, 271; sonnets by, 271–274; liter-
ary companionship of, with Shelley and Keats, 273.
James the First, of Scotland, 42.
J.
James the First, of England, sonnets by, 117, 118; literary character of,
119-122.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, his captious criticism of Milton's sonnets, 160–163.
Jonson, Ben, his simile for bell-ringing, 9; his valuation of Shakespeare,
80; sneers at sonnet, 82; his sonnets and other poetry criticised, 82–89;
sonnets by, 87, 88; influence of new school of poetry on, 147, 148.
K.
Keats, John, his sonnets and Shelley's compared, 226, 227; quality of his
sonnets, 228; passages from his sonnets, 229, 230; sonnets by, 231, 232.
L.
Lamb, Charles, remarks on his sonnets, with examples, 235-241; as a
lover, 238; his lines on the Album, 242; sonnet on, by Moxon, 243.
Lindsay, Sir David, 45.
Lloyd, Charles, Coleridge's estimate of his sonnets, 246; sonnet by, 246.
Lofft, Capel, critical sonnet on the sonnet, by, 234.
316
Index.
Longfellow, Henry W., his sonnets compared with Bryant's and Tenny-
son's, 280, 281; sonnets by, 286-289.
Lowell, James R., sonnets by, 300, 301.
Lydgate, John, 42.
M.
Macready, William C., on Talfourd's "Ion," 251.
Mallet, David, 171, 173.
Marlowe, Christopher, 79, 82.
Marvell, Andrew, 160.
Massinger, Philip, 82.
Metaphor as a definer, 8.
Milton, John, Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth on his sonnets, 160-163; gen-
eral outline of his sonnets, with selections, 160; his bearing under blind-
ness, 163, 165; his letter to Philara, 165, 166; individuality of sonnets
of, 269.
Modern origin of sonnet, 12.
Modern sonnet, alleged deterioration of, 14; alleged sameness and lack of
individuality of examined, 267–269.
Moir, David M., sonnets by, 303, 304.
Montgomery, James, poetical reputation of, 223, 224; sonnets by, 225.
Moon, Sir Philip Sidney's sonnet to the, 38.
Motherwell, William, sonnets by, 278–280.
N.
Nash, Tom, his eulogy on Sir Philip Sidney, 54; decried genius of Shake-
speare, 79.
Norton, Thomas, 45.
"Nosce Teipsum," Sir John Davies's, 108-110.
Nymphidia, Drayton's, 105.
P.
Petrarch, Francis, his influence on early sonnet, 14; criticism of his son-
nets by Warton and Coleridge, 20-22; sonnets by, 22-24; poems of
known to Chaucer, 25; probable meeting with Chaucer, 25, 26.
Poe, Edgar A., sonnet by, 308.
Index.
317
Poetry, English, influence of Surrey's and Wyatt's sonnets on, 36; night
of, 42; service to, by obscure early poets, 43; dawn of, 45; character of,
just after Elizabethan era, 147, 148; later new era in, 170.
Poets, character and services of, between Chaucer and Spenser, 42, 43;
quality of sonnets by recent discussed, 265–267.
Poly-Olbion, Drayton's, 105, 106.
Pope, Alexander, sonnet by, 167, 168.
Procter, Bryan Waller, remarks on his songs and sonnets, 243, 244; son-
nets by, 244, 245.
Provençals, invention of sonnet ascribed to, 12.
Quarles, Francis, 137.
Q.
R.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, his character and writings, 89, 90; Spenser's Faerie
Queene, dedicated to, 89; sonnets by, 90, 91; his apostrophe to Death,
126, 127.
Rogers, Samuel, his low valuation of the sonnet, 223; sonnet by, 223.
S.
Sackville, Thomas (Lord Buckhurst), 45.
Sancho Panza, saying of, 116.
Savage, Richard, 171, 173.
Scott, Sir Walter, 222.
Selden, John, annotated the Poly-Olbion, 105.
Shakespeare, William, estimate of his sonnets by Wordsworth and Cole.
ridge, 61; his sonnets, when written, 62; characteristic lines and phrases
in his sonnets, 62-66; his sonnets, to whom addressed, 67; use of mas-
culine form in his sonnets, 68; his sonnets arranged in six poems, 69;
specimens of his sonnets, 70-72; poetical supremacy of disputed by
contemporaries, 79; influence of in naturalizing sonnet, 81; individuali-
ty of his sonnets, 269.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, his sonnets and Keats's compared, 226, 227; son-
nets by, 227, 228.
Sidney, Sir Philip, his sonnet to the Moon, 38; date of his earliest publica-
心
​318
Index.
:
tions, 42-46; account of his sonnets, and comparison of with Spenser's,
46–49, 52, 53, 56; sonnets by, 49-51; his Arcadia and Defence of Poesy,
51; indifferent to poetical renown, 53; Tom Nash's eulogy on, 54; his
influence in naturalizing sonnet, 78, 80, 81; King James's sonnet on, 117.
Smith, Charlotte, account of her sonnets, with examples, 253, 254.
Sonnet, the, compared to diamond, 9, 12, 15, 83; defined by Wordsworth,
11; modern origin of, 12; early specimens of, 13; origin of ascribed to
Provençals, 12; alleged modern deterioration of, 14; when introduced
in England, 25, 28; influence of on English literature, 37, 38; influence
of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare in establishing, 78-81; neglected
by Shakespeare's greatest contemporaries, 82; influence of Daniel, Dray-
ton, and others on, 82, 83; characteristics of the true, 83; Hallam on
structure of, 128, 129; reigns of the Stuarts unfavorable to, 160; neg-
lect of in succeeding reigns, 166, 167; enlarged sphere of, 180, 189.
Sonnets by Wordsworth, 11, 190-212; Fra Guittone, 13; Dante, 18-20;
Petrarch, 22-24; Earl of Surrey, 29, 30; Sir Thomas Wyatt, 33, 34;
Henry the Eighth, 46; Sir Philip Sidney, 38, 46-49, 52, 53, 56; Edmund
Spenser, 46-49, 52–54, 57, 58–60; William Shakespeare, 61-72; Ben
Jonson, 84, 85, 87, 88; Sir Walter Raleigh, 90, 91; George Chapman, 93–
99; Samuel Daniel, 102-104; Michael Drayton, 106, 107; Sir John Da-
vies, 110, 111; James the First, 117, 118; John Donne, 124–126; Wil-
liam Drummond, 127-131; Thomas Carew, 132, 133; Robert Herrick,
134-136; George Wither, 138-140; William Browne, 141; George Her-
bert, 143–146; William Habington, 148-153; Edmund Waller, 153, 154;
John Milton, 160–165; Alexander Pope, 167, 168; Dr. Edward Young,
169;
Thomas Gray, 172; William Cowper, 176, 177; Thomas Warton,
178, 179; William Lisle Bowles, 183-189; William Wordsworth, 11,
190-212; Robert Southey, 215, 216; S. T. Coleridge, 216-220; Lord By-
ron, 220, 221; Robert Burns, 222; Samuel Rogers, 223; James Mont-
gomery, 225; Percy Bysshe Shelley, 227, 228; John Keats, 229–232;
Henry Kirke White, 233, 234; Charles Lamb, 235-241; Edward Moxon,
243; Barry Cornwall, 243-246; Charles Lloyd, 246; Bernard Barton,
247-249; Henry F. Cary, 249–251; Thomas Noon Talfourd, 252; Char-
lotte Smith, 253, 254; Mrs. Hemans, 253-259; Leigh Hunt, 271-274;
Washington Allston, 276; Richard H. Dana, 278; Joseph Rodman Drake,
278; William Motherwell, 278–280; Alfred Tennyson, 281–286; Henry
Index.
319
W. Longfellow, 286-289; William C. Bryant, 290, 291; John G. Whit-
tier, 294; Thomas Hood, 296-298; Aubrey de Vere, 299, 300; James
Russell Lowell, 300, 301; Edmund C. Stedman, 301; Matthew Arnold,
302; Thomas B. Aldrich, 303; David M. Moir, 303, 304; Robert Buchan-
an, 304, 305; Henry Alford, 305; Sydney Dobell, 306, 307; Edgar A.
Poe, 308; Oliver W. Holmes, 309; Charles Tennyson Turner, 309; Blan-
co White, 310.
Southey, Robert, on digressions, 80; on Daniel's poetry, 102; on Wither's
works, 138; character of his sonnets, 215; sonnets by, 216.
Spenser, Edmund, his simile for steeples, 9; his versions of Petrarch's
"Visions," 23, 24; date of his earliest productions, 42-46; outline of
his sonnets and comparison of with Sidney's, 46-57; quality of sonnets
as compared with his other poetry, 57; sonnets by, 58–60; influence of
in naturalizing sonnet, 78, 80, 81; individuality of his sonnets, 269.
Stedman, Edmund C., sonnet by, 301.
Steeples, Spenser's simile for, 9.
Stella, Sidney's, 49, 53, 54.
Sternhold and Hopkins, 45.
Suckling, Sir John, 160.
Surrey (Henry Howard), the Earl of, instrumental in introducing the son-
net, 27, 28; estimate of his poetry, 28; literary relationship to Wyatt,
28, 29; the first writer of English blank-verse, 29; sonnets by, 29, 30;
elegy by on Wyatt, 31; low ebb of poetry between him and Spenser,
42, 43.
Swinburne, Algernon, his critical estimate of Chapman, 91, 92, 95.
T.
Talfourd, Thomas Noon, character of his dramas, 251; sonnets by, 252.
Tennyson, Alfred, his revival of Wyatt, 30, 31; comparison of his sonnets
with Bryant's and Tennyson's, 280, 281; sonnets by, 281–286.
Thomson, James, Wordsworth on the "Seasons" of, 170; poetical superi-
ority to school of Addison and Pope, 171.
Tragedy, the first regular English, 45.
Turner, Charles Tennyson, sonnet by, 309.
Tusser, Thomas, 44.
21
320
Index.
f
Vernaccia, Ludovico, 13.
Vigne, Piero della, 13.
V.
W.
Waller, Edmund, belongs to transitional period of English poetry, 147;
his poetical rank, 148; sonnets by, 153, 154.
Warton, Thomas, his criticism of Petrarch, 20-22; character of his son-
nets, 178; sonnets by, 179.
White, Blanco, sonnet by, 310.
White, Henry Kirke, estimate of his sonnets, 233; sonnets by, 233, 234.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, his poetry and Bryant's compared, 292, 293;
sonnets by, 294.
Wither, George, instrumental in perfecting sonnet, 82; sonnets by, 138, 139.
Wordsworth, William, his sonnet to "The Sonnet," 11; his estimate of
Shakespeare's sonnets, 61; points of resemblance to Daniel, 101; re-
marks of on Milton's sonnets, 160; his estimate of poetry of reign of
Queen Anne, 170; influence of Bowles's sonnets on, 182; outline and
specimens of his sonnets, 190-212; individuality of his sonnets, 269.
Wyatt, Sir Thomas (the elder), estimate of the poetry of, 28; his literary
relationship to Surrey, 28, 29; revival of memory of by Tennyson, 30,
31; Surrey's elegy on, 31; outline of themes of his sonnets, 33; sonnets
by, 33, 34; song by, 35.
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