Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses
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, by verse distills your truth."

Beside 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. We have thus frankly referred to the opinions of Dr. Johnson and Lord Byron (odd company indeed!), both strong names and witnesses against our cause. We 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, we 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 chace? 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 comVOL. XIX.-No. 38.

55

pletely repudiated; it demands too much of the 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 we think decreasing class, his zealous admirers, we 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, we 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 mankind. How much is it to be deplored that Lord Byron was too disdainful habitually to lay his restless head in the lap of nature! His conceptions, lofty as they unquestionably often were, were not distinct enough for a poem of limited size; his emotions, deep as they were, unhappily were not chastened. Language did not sit upon him as a garment, but girt him like harness, as his more discriminating admirer often, to his discomfiture, perceives. When we hear Lord Byron's doubts as to the capabilities of the English language for the sonnet, we should recollect that he was far from being well read in English poetry, and that he was not well inclined to believe that what he himself was unequal to could be accomplished by any of his cotemporaries.

But leaving the witnesses, let us look to the charge. The sonnet is not suited to the English language. In what respect does the language fail? Surely not in expression, for no one

*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.

will venture to deny that a certain number of English words will convey as much thought as an equal number of the words of any language living or dead. The alleged defect refers, we may fairly presume, to considerations of versification. A poverty of rhyme and a deficiency of harmony are imputed to the language, which if merited would indeed disqualify it for the continuous melody of the sonnet. We regard the charge as an idle prejudice. To complain of language is a hacknied device to conceal ignorance or incompetency. Let any one reflect on what has been accomplished by the English tongue, let him muse awhile on the achievements of English prose or English verse, and he may well be impatient of these disloyal repinings. Whoever undertakes to bring down Sir Thomas Brown's record to our own times, to be the historian of vulgar errors, of men's follies and mistakes, should place this in the foremost rank--the opinion which ascribes a narrowness to that glorious way, over which Shakspeare and Milton, Taylor and Barrow, Baxter and Bunyan, Burke, Coleridge and Wordsworth have passed into the hearts and minds of the British race on both sides of the Atlantic.

The sonnet has been successfully naturalized into English literature. Its first introduction was cotemporary with the early improvement in our poetry, by which metrical forms of versification were substituted for the old rhythmical mode. Its prescriptive title is therefore as good as that of any other form. The first English sonnets were written by Henry Howard, the gallant but unfortunate Earl of Surrey. The melodies of strange languages had fallen on his ear; yet he neither remained abroad to renounce his own home, nor did he return with a heart corrupted by foreign travel, but, in a spirit of pure and lofty patriotism, he sought his native land, to call up the yet buried harmonies of his mother tongue. This honour is shared with him by his cotemporary and friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt. We have already shown that the sonnet has been employed with honour by others--the chief of English poets. In the hands of Shakspeare its form was modified; and as we are much more disposed to regard him as a lawmaker than as an outlaw, we cannot but think that there is too dainty a preciseness in the hesitation, which is felt in applying the name to other forms than the original model. We are ready to adopt Shakspeare's enlargement of the meaning of the word, because no essential principle whatever of the poem is sacrificed by the variety. But to avoid the appearance of a mere verbal dispute, if we adopt the stricter sense of the term, the severer form of the poem, the legitimate sonnet, as it is called, the poets of England have abundantly vindicated the powers of the language. It is to a living poet that the glory of consummating

this victory over a wide-spread prejudice is due. The notes that proclaim this triumph of the English muse, are uttered by the sonnets of William Wordsworth. From these alone, we might readily show the abundant richness of the language in rhymes, its power of expression, and its flexibility of metre. With those, indeed, who are accustomed only to the more prominent rhymes, and the more marked forms of verse, the melody of the sonnet may often fall as on a deaf ear. But to a cultivated taste, and to the secret sense of hearing, apt for the music of poetry, we would cheerfully commit almost any one of Mr. Wordsworth's sonnets, without an apprehension that the sweetness and variety of its harmony would pass unheeded. The following may be taken after little more than a moment's selection :

"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:
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."

Another prejudice, perhaps the most deeply seated, against the sonnet, results from an impression that it always treats a subject exclusively with reference to the feelings of the poet. Hence it is censured as egotistical, and is looked upon as the vent of moping and discontented humours, and of insipid sentimentality. That there are very many sonnets justly obnoxious to these reproaches, may be freely admitted; and, also, that a bad sonnet is, for reasons that might readily be stated, one of the worst of failures. Of those who have been able to find none other, we can only say, that they have been indeed unfortunate in their selection. But we protest against this indiscriminate grouping of the good and bad: if the sonnet be judged on that principle, how will the epic abide it? A bad epic is very bad, too, and a great deal more of it. It is one of the merits of the English sonnet writers that they have qualified the subjective character of the poem; the feelings of the poet are not necessarily most prominent; many of the best of the English sonnets may be read without recognising him as any thing more than a voice.

That the sonnet is egotistical, is obviously only a compara

tive censure. Whether this is to be imputed to it for its reproach or its repute, will manifestly depend upon whose egotism it is. If it express the feelings of a hollow heart, or the thought of an empty head, nothing can be more valueless. But has it not been the key to open the secret cabinet of spirits whose stores were precious? When Shakspeare meditated upon his theatrical profession, it was in the sonnet that he breathed out his sense of degradation in that beautiful lament, of which the tone is a little louder than a sigh, and yet not so harsh as a murmur. It is here that his genius, no longer embodied in its creations, appears to us in its individual nature; he walks upon the earth in his own personal form. What poem can boast of greater interest?

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there,

And made myself a motley to the view,

Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.

Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely; but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love.
Now all is done, save what shall have no end:
Mine appetite I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A God in love, to whom I am confin'd.

Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most loving breast."

Again, in reference to the same topic :

"O, for my sake do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,

Than public means, which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renew'd;
Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink
Potions of eysell, 'gainst my strong infection;
No bitterness that I will bitter think,
No double penance, to correct correction.

Pity me, then, dear friend, and I assure ye,
Even that your pity is enough to cure me."

This would be sweet language from any lips; but what can be deeper than the pathos of it, when you reflect that it is the grief of one whose wisdom, for more than two centuries, has been reverently quoted by statesmen, philosophers, and divines; whose plots have wound round so many hearts, and moistened so many eyes; whose pictures of passions have moved such sympathies, and whose wit has gladdened so many faces. It is in his sonnets that you find the conclusive proof that he was