Angels alone, that soare above,
Enjoy such libertie."*

If further proof be required of the capabilities of the sonnet, an argument of no mean authority may be found in the fact that it was not too narrow for the spirit of Shakspeare. If any one still believes that the loftiest poetic temperament should not brook its bondage, let him stand up and say so after reading the following, one of the least-neglected, perhaps, of the collection of Shakspeare's sonnets:—

"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:

Oh, no; it is an ever-fixéd 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 out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved."

It would be difficult to cite a finer passage of moral poetry than this description of the master-passion.†

* Lovelace, 1642.

The fame of having composed the finest prose delineation of the passion of Love may be claimed for Coleridge: it may be found in a piece entitled "The Improvisatore," included in his poetical works. For philosophical analysis and for beauty of expression it is unequalled by any single passage on the subject. As a piece of abstract description or definition it is not surpassed by the celebrated definition of wit in Barrow's Sermons.

How true and how ennobling to our nature! We at once recognise in it the abstraction of that conception which has found a dwelling and a name in the familiar forms of Desdemona, Juliet, Imogen, Cordelia,— of Romeo, and of Othello too, if that character be correctly understood. If this sonnet was written before his dramas, then it was the pregnant thought from which were destined to spring those inimitable creations of female character that have been loved, as if they were living beings, by thousands. If, as is most probable, it was written afterwards, it is Shakspeare's own comment, and might be prefixed as a most apposite motto to those dramas in which he has given life and motion to the conception. The gladdening influences of a lover's thoughts-the cheering light of a pure affection -were never depicted with truer feeling than in the following sonnet :—

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee. And then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love, remembered, such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

I make no apology for quoting from the same collection another specimen, in which the reader cannot fail to

observe an abundant measure of that exquisite but uncloying sweetness which distinguishes so much of the old English poetry. This sonnet would have been a meet melody to be chanted, with the songs of Herbert and Herrick, by the honoured lips of old Izaak Walton :—

"Oh, 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 perfuméd tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their maskéd buds discloses :
But, for their virtue only is their show,

They lived unwooed, 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, by verse distils your truth."

Besides these objections, which are equally applicable to the sonnets of all nations, the English sonnet is charged with faults of its own. Dr. Johnson's opinion has been already adverted to. Lord Byron, in one of the very few sonnets he wrote, makes the same admission, —that it is a form of poetry not suited to our language; and, though some allowance is to be made for the language of compliment which he was addressing to an Italian lady, yet the fact that the noble poet, with all his Italian promptings, so rarely made use of the sonnet, is proof enough of his sentiments. I have thus frankly referred to the opinions of Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron, (odd company indeed!) both strong names and witnesses against our cause. I must be allowed to speak of them

with equal freedom. There will be no novelty in the expression of an opinion derogatory to Dr. Johnson's character as a critic of poetry, nor will it be necessary, I presume, to remind the reader of the errors, both of judgment and taste, in his principal critical work. Dr. Johnson had, in fact, a hearty love for only one period of English poetry, and that not its best period. His affection was given to the poetry of that time when the native vigour of the poetry of England was enfeebled by the introduction of Gallic refinements,-when the healthy, sanguine English Muse was miserably depleted. To say that he was little better than blind and deaf to all else would scarcely be using language too strong. Out of the limits, of the period referred to, he praised only by compulsion, as is apparent from his reluctance, such as is manifested in his criticisms on the minor poems of Milton. There is no instance on record in which the guilt of literary omission attaches more strongly and has done more injury than in Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the English Poets." For aught that appears there, Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakspeare, (as a poet apart altogether from the dramatist,) and Drayton, Daniel, Sir Philip Sidney, and others of the age of Queen Elizabeth, -the chief of the poets of England,-might never have breathed a verse. And, in the dreary absence of these, after what names is the misguided reader led in chase? Stepney, Mallet, Granville and Pomfret, Hughes and Yalden and Sprat,-" rats and mice and such small deer." Now, the school of poetry which was favourite with Dr. Johnson was exactly that by which the sonnet was completely repudiated; it demands too much of thei substance of poetry to have found favour in the eyes of

the Charles II. and Queen Anne's men.*

It is a fact

of considerable interest as bearing on our subject, and one which will be appreciated by those who are familiar with the different ages of English poetry, that during the most artificial period the sonnet was neglected almost universally; and that it revives with the taste for the earlier models, which is one of the best features in the literature of our day, and from which we may infer that poetry at least is completing a cycle by a return to primitive power and simplicity. To invalidate the authority of Lord Byron's name may be a more delicate task than that we have just attempted. Conceding all the vigour of imagination that may be claimed for him by that large but decreasing class, his zealous admirers, I cannot but believe that he greatly wanted the qualities essential to success in the severer forms of poetry. This would have been especially felt in the sonnet. Neither his habits of thought nor his modes of feeling were adapted to it, nor had he sufficient command of expression. His head and his heart and his tongue were all undisciplined. The time has gone by, I hope, for the misplaced sympathy with what are called the eccentricities of genius, and for the fallacy which recognises the right of any mortal to claim exemption from the laws which universally control the intellectual as well as moral being of man

We may be reminded that the selection for the lives was made by the publishers. We are aware of that fact, but it is an inadequate apology. Dr. Johnson himself suggested names,—some of those we have referred to in the text. He might have controlled and extended the selection; or, if not, he might at least have proclaimed the existence of other treasures, if his taste had prompted him to an acquaintance with the earlier poetry of England.