asi: and its sestet, when distinct at all, is not composed of two tercets-two prismatic lights of blue and yellow forming one luminous green, as these may be considered. Instead of this construction, it is made up of four elegiac quatrains clinched by a rhymed couplet with a new sound; and, generally, it presents the motif as it were in a transparent sphere, instead of as a cameo with two sides. Its gain upon the Spenserian, to which it is so closely allied, is great having a swiftness of motion-now like a lithe beast of prey, now like a tide in the spring-equinox rushing over a level shore-alien to its predecessor; a pulsation like that of the planets Sirius or Jupiter, compared with the ineffectual fires of a nameless star. Its formula, once more, is as follows:

A-B-A-B
C-D-C- - D
E-F E-F

G-G

Referring, in a chapter dealing with the sonnets of Rossetti, to the two archetypal forms, I wrote some three years ago that "The Shakespearian sonnet is like a red-hot bar being moulded upon a forge till-in the closing couplet-it receives the final clenching blow from the heavy hammer: while the Petrarcan, on the other hand, is like a wind gathering in volume and dying away again immediately on attaining a culminating force." The anterior simile is the happier : for the second I should now be inclined to substitute the Petrarcan sonnet is like an oratorio, where the

m

musician wh ns of hun

Bions are distinct, and whose close is a the culmination of the foregoing its love Petrarca himself, in one of his altation, arginalia to his sonnets, remarked that terness. uld invariably be more harmonious th a splen ginning, i.e., should be dominantly Rossetti, n the reader.

e opsterior tong the 'Sleep' of Samuel Daniel I do Asserensing se it is in the true Shakespearian type (as is Don's)-though he wrote mostly in the latter mou-but because in this example is shown the final transition from an octave of two rhymes to the English archetype as already formulated. It must not be overlooked, however, that he used and used well the Shakespearian form.

TO SLEEP.

Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
Brother to Death, in silent darkness born,
Relieve my languish, and restore the light;
With dark forgetting of my care return,
And let the day be time enough to mourn
The shipwreck of my ill-adventured youth:
Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
Without the torment of the night's untruth.
Cease, dreams, the images of day-desires,
To model forth the passions of the morrow;
Never let rising Sun approve you liars,
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.

The sonnet by Michael Drayton which I shall next quote is not only the finest of Elizabethan sonnets by writers other than Shakespeare, but in

condensed passion is equalled only ball, is not of those of the great master, and is sc lights of none, either of his or of any later poet

A PARTING.

green, as is construcns clinched ound; and,

were in a

Since there's no help, come, let us kiss
Nay, I have done, you get no more of m
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heaO with two
That thus so cleanly I myself can free:
o which it
Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vowswift
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.

no

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!

But it was in Shakespeare's hands that the English sonnet first became immutably established in our literature. These magnificent poems-magnificent nothwithstanding many minor flaws-must always hold their high place, not only as the personal record of the greatest of our poets, but for the sake of their own consummate beauty and intellectual force. I may repeat the words I wrote in the Introductory Essay on my edition of his Songs and Sonnets which in December last appeared in the same series as that in which this volume now docs. "It is because this great master over the passions and follies and heroisms of man has at least once dropped the veil of impersonality that we are so fascinated by the sonnets. Here the

ne of

passe

nd part,

musician who has otherwise played for all generations of humanity, pipes a solitary tune of his own life, its love, its devotion, its fervour, its prophetic exaltation, its passion, its despair, its exceeding bitterness. Veritably, we are here face to face with a splendour amid glooms."

Rossetti, the greatest master of sonnet-music posterior to the 'starre of poets,' declared while expressing his unbounded admiration for Shakespeare's sonnets that "conception-fundamental brain-work-is what makes the difference in all art... A Shakespearian sonnet is better than the most perfect in form because Shakespeare wrote it." Again, the opinion of so acute a critic and genuine a poet as Mr. Theodore Watts may here be appropriately quoted :-"The quest of the Shakespearian form is not," so writes Mr Watts, "like that of the form adopted by Milton, sonority and, so to speak, metrical counterpoint, but sweetness and the sweetest of all possible arrangements in English versification is a succession of decasyllabic quatrains in alternate rhymes knit together, and clinched by a couplet-a couplet coming not too far from the initial verse to lose its binding power, and yet not too near the initial verse for the ring of epigram to disturb 'the linked sweetness long drawn out' of this movement, but sufficiently near to shed its influence over the poem back to the initial verse." This is admirably expressed, and true so far as it goes, but to a far wider scope than 'sweetness' does the Shakespearian sonnet reach. Having already given a good example of sonnets cast in this

mould, it is not necessary to quote another by the chief master of the English sonnet : still I may give one of the latter's greatest, perhaps the greatest of his or of any other, which will not only serve as a supreme example of the type, but will demonstrate a capability of impressiveness uns passed by any sonnet of Dante or Milton. 스

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted, aud no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows: yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Between Shakespeare and Milton there is not much to chronicle concerning the history of the sonnet. Its chief intermediate composer was Drummond of Hawthornden, a graceful poet but assuredly not the master he has again and again been represented to be. His essential weakness may be seen in his inability to adopt any pure mould his sonnets may either be regarded as English bastards of Italian parentage or as Italian refugees disguised in a semi-insular costume. Hitherto, and this not obliviously of several noble examples by Shakespeare of a more impersonal scope, most English sonnets were amatory, to such