There is no more noteworthy instance of Rossetti's delicate judgment in revision than the substitution in the eleventh line of side for flesh, the artistic gain in the later reading being unmistakable; he felt that the exquisiteness of the picture was disturbed by a word not beautiful in itself and vulgarised by usage in a special sense. No. cxcii. This sonnet is one of three grouped under the same title. What a magnificent suggestion of space-what a boundless horizon is opened up-in the closing lines! No. cxciii. The most terrible of sonnets, in its spiritual signifi cance. I may quote the last sonnet of this series, certainly one of the most noble sonnet-sequences in existence. THE ONE HOPE. When vain desire at last and vain regret Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain, And teach the unforgetful to forget? Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet, Or may the soul at once in a green plain Stoop through the spray of some sweet life-fountain And cull the dew-drenched flowering amulet? Ah! when the wan soul in that golden air Between the scriptured petals softly blown Peers breathless for the gift of grace unknown Ah! let none other alien spell soc'er But only the one Hope's one name be there,— Nos. cxcvi.-cxcvii. WILLIAM MICHAEL ROSSETTI. Mr. W. M. Rossetti, widely known as an accomplished critic, has published no volume of verse, although he has written a considerable quantity, especially in sonnet-form. Democracy Downtrodden" is well known to all students of contemporary verse, and is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest Miltonic sonnets of our time. 66 No. cxcviii. THOMAS RUSSELL (1762-1788). The sonnet by this unfortunate young clergyman which was so greatly praised by Landor. Wordsworth, Bowles, and other authorities agreed in ranking it high, and this we may well do without going the same length as did Landor-"A poem on Philoctetes by a Mr. Russell which would authorise him to join the shades of Sophocles and Euripides." Nos. cxcix.-cciii. WILLIAM BELL SCOTT. This accomplished poet, artist, and critic is not so widely known in his first-named capacity as he ought to be. Among men of letters themselves he holds a high and honoured place. He presents a curious contrast to his brother, the late David Scott, that most imaginative of all the artists whom Scotland has produced, often, and not without some reason, called the Scottish Blake. Mr. W. Bell Scott's work is keenly intellectual, but it is also characterised by great simplicity of expression. His Poems by a Painter, his Poems and Ballads and Studies from Nature, and his Harvest Home are treasured possessions with those who know how to value as well as how to own good books. He has written many very striking sonnets, and in making a fairly representative selection I have been forced to omit several which I would gladly have inserted. The intellectual vision of such a sonnet as "The Universe Void," the meditative beauty of "The Old House," and the pathetic human note in "Parted Love" must appeal to everyone. No. cciv. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822). Shelley wrote even fewer sonnets than did Byron: but the few that Byron wrote he wrote well, which cannot be said of Shelley. This imaginative and beautiful (though far from flawless) poem in fourteen lines is so divergent from all accepted rules that it can hardly be styled a sonnet. No writer now-a-days could venture to print a sonnet with such rhymes as stone-frown, appear—despair. As an imaginative poem it is, as is felt at once by every reader, very impressive. It is strange that Shelley, the most poetic of poets, should have been unable to write a good sonnet as a sonnet: but probably the restrictions of the form pressed upon him with a special heaviness. Chopin, the Shelley of musical composers, wrote his beautiful mazurkas: looked at strictly as mazurkas they are unsatisfactory. In both instances, however, uncontrollable genius overbalanced propriety of form. Mr. Main prints the famous West Wind lyric as five sonnets. That these stanzas are not sonnets, however, need hardly be explained to anyone who knows them, and what a lyric is, and what a sonnet. It is true that they are divisible into five fourteen-line parts: but the result of disintegration is only to present several hopelessly irregular sonnets, and to tend to dissipate the lyric emotion aroused by the very first words of Shelley's exquisite poem. Moreover, that Shelley himself had no such idea is evident from the fact that the line which would be the fourteenth of the fourth "sonnet" ends with a comma, which occurs in the middle of a sentence "Tameless, and swift, and proud," V. "Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is." Mr. J. A. Symonds has adequately defined the metrical structure of this famous lyric as "interrupted terza rima.” No. ccv. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SIMCOX. Mr. Simcox is the author of Poems and Romances. No. ccvi. ALEXANDER SMITH (1830-1867). Alexander Smith is probably read by five where a quarter of a century ago he was read by a hundred. His Life-Drama is now eminently an upper-shelf book. He wrote few sonnets; none very striking. No. ccvi. is his best, though too markedly derivative. No. ccvii. sonnets. No. ccviii. ROBERT SOUTHEY (1794-1843). Southey wrote very few ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. This sonnet has not hitherto been printed, nor that which is quoted below; and I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. Stevenson for permission to publish them in this anthology, though they were not sent to me for that purpose. THE ARABESQUE (COMPLAINT OF AN ARTIST). I made a fresco on the coronal, Amid the sounding silence and the void Of life's wind-swept and unfrequented hall. I drew the nothings that my soul enjoyed; The petty image of the enormous fact I fled; and when the sun soared over all And from the august silence of the skies Babble of speech returns to us again. BB J Nos. ccix.-x. CHARLES STRONG (1785-1864). From Sonnets, by the Rev. Charles Strong, 1835. An accomplished man and accomplished writer. Nos. ccxi.-ccXV. ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. It might naturally have been expected that, like Shelley, Mr. Swinburne would not have proved himself a good sonnet-writer. His high and eminently lyrical genius, however, has not prevented his achieving success in this form. No. ccx. is the fine dedicatory sonnet to Mr. Theodore Watts prefixed to Tristram in Lyonesse : and other Poems; those on Ford and Webster are from a striking series on the Elizabethan dramatists in the same volume, and are inscriptions in presentation copies of the old dramatists to Mr. Watts. From the same series are Nos. ccxiii. and ccxiv.-the latter, in my opinion, one of the poet's finest sonnet-utterances. Those who have not read Mr. Swinburne's later volumes, may be said to be absolutely ignorant of the real nature of his genius and his work. About half a dozen erotic poems, literary exercises of an imitative kind, gave him the reputation of a poet "without a conscience or an aim." This reputation clings to him still-if not in England, in America and the colonies, where English criticism of English writers permeates with a slowness that is altogether unaccountable. Posterity, however, having only the poet's work to judge from, finding there a few score lines of questionable erotics scattered through a vast mass of poetry, displaying (if one may speak from the purely artistic standpoint) only too much "conscience and aim," will be strangely puzzled on reading such contemporary criticisms of his poetry as may survive. To go no farther back than the last seven years of the poet's life-years spent much out of London, partly "beneath the trees of leafy Surrey," partly in Wiltshire, and partly in Guernsey and Sark-he has, during that time, written nothing but poetry dealing with the noblest aspirations, the most exalted enthusiasms, and the purest passions of men. Upon his views of the Irish question, as set forth in a much discussed political lyric of recent publication, I have nothing to say, save that they are not "new," as so many have supposed. He formulated them in the Rappel three years ago. They are views he has always shared with Mazzini, Karl Blind, and others among his friends. Nos. ccxvi.-ccxxi. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. Mr. J. A. Symond's wide reputation as a broad and sympathetic critic-indeed, as one of the two or three really eminent critics among us-and as a writer of beautiful and powerful prose, has overshadowed his claims to the place among the poets of the day that is his due. He has written a large number of sonnets, and one of his latest books-Vagabunduli Libellus-consists of poems in this form only. His sonnets are unequal, partly owing to his fondness for writing sonnet-sequences— a great mistake in nine cases out of ten. That Mr. Symonds is a true poet, a poet of generally high standing, no one will be prepared to deny after perusal of his poetry. The author of that eminently critical, fascinating, picturesquely, yet learnedly and carefully written magnum opus, The History of the Renaissance in Italy, has so great a power over words that his natural tendency, even in verse, is to let himself be carried away by them, Some of his later sonnets are very markedly of Shakespearian inspiration. Those I have quoted seem to me to form the best representative selection that could be made, exhibiting as they do Mr. Symonds' range. The contrast between the sombre ccxviii. and the glowing ccxx. is very striking. The following (which, like each of the foregoing, with the exception of No. ccxv., is from Vagabunduli Libellus) is interesting on account of its being constructed upon only three rhymes, ire, eeze, ark: IN BLACK AND WHITE: WINTER ETCHINGS. I. The Chorister. Snow on the high-pitched minster roof and spire: Inside the church, within the shadowy choir, Dim burn the lamps like lights on vaporous sas; Startles the stillness; throbs that soul of fire, Yearns in sharp anguish of untold desire. Reference was made in the Introduction to a sonnet where the first three lines rhyme, and therewith also the fifth, sixth, and seventh; there are, as already stated, one or two sonnets in French so constructed, but the following is, so far as I know, the only example of the kind in English : |