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recalls with a sigh the "dear delicious pain" that "swelled his loaded heart" and "dimmed his swimming eye," at the spectacle of the pensive fair dropping the tear of sensibility. In other early "effusions" also, e. g., the sonnet "Calm is all Nature," etc. (1786), and the Forncett sonnet cited in Knight's Life of Wordsworth, i., p. 67 (1791 or 1792), as well as in The Evening Walk (1787-9) and Descriptive Sketches (1791-2), both published in 1793, this "fantastic wantonness of woe recurs more or less distinctly. In the poems of 1793 indeed, as M. Legouis points out, while the observation of nature is direct, and the descriptive touches vigorous and truthful, both the form and the sentiment, on the other hand, are factitious and derived. Wordsworth is here wielding the pen of Gray, Collins, and, above all, Beattie. The long vacation tour in Switzerland, for instance, which in the Prelude is depicted as a sort of triumphal progress of radiant Youth, appears in the Sketches as the Sentimental Journey of a tristful Werther, stricken with the fashionable déchirement de cœur. But Wordsworth's strong sense and native man

liness would not suffer him long to deal in such moral coxcombry. He soon grew impatient of its absurdity and unreality, and with hearty contempt turned his back on green-sickness and sonneteering. From 1791 to 1802 he steadily eschewed the Sonnet as an "egregious absurdity."

Again, from his Cambridge studies under Agostino Isola, Wordsworth must, during the years 1787 -1791, have become familiarly versed in the poetry of the Italian sonnet-writers. Now that poetry may not unfairly be characterized as "vain and amatorious;" its subject-matter is mainly unprosperous love-a theme lying quite aloof from the Poet's "haunt, and the main region of his song." Love, indeed, was a topic whereon he had, perhaps, already resolved within himself, so far as might be, to hold his peace.

At first, then, the literary conditions of the time had combined with his University training to implant in Wordsworth a contempt for the Sonnet as a vehicle of poetic thought. In 1802, however, a change, attended with important consequences to English literature, occurred in his way of thinking.

In that year Wordsworth was oppressed with an "importunate and heavy load" of thoughts on the tremendous " sorrows of the time," and was casting about him for a vehicle wherein to give them clear and permanent utterance. On Friday, May 21, as we learn from her Journal, Dorothy Wordsworth happened to read over to her brother the sonnets of Milton; and although already so familiar with these compositions that he could repeat them by heart, he yet received from her recital so novel and vivid an impression of their "harmony, gravity, and republican austerity of style," that in the course of the same day he produced three sonnets on the Miltonian model, and " soon after many others." Within four months he had written, amongst a total of eighteen, the following samples of distinguished merit: the Westminster Bridge Sonnet, "It is a beauteous Evening," "Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour," and the Sonnet on the Extinction of the Venetian Republic.

Though, as we have said, familiar with the theory and practice of the Italian Sonneteers, it is to Milton, rather than to Dante, Petrarch, or

Michael Angelo, that Wordsworth looked as his exemplar in this kind of composition. Now Milton in his turn had gone to school to the Italians; but in so doing, whilst he punctiliously observed the formal rules sanctioned by them, he discarded, or, as some think, simply failed to notice, certain material rules, which they were exact in observing. The minor pause after the first quatrain, for instance, and the fuller pause or volta at the close of the octave, are each carefully marked by Dante and Petrarch; but Milton disregards, or, it may be, overlooks, now the one, now the other, and, in a few cases, both of these pauses. It is not clear whether he does so designedly, or simply from lack of insight into his Masters' art. The late Mark Pattison seems to have inclined to the latter opinion; but others have argued, more plausibly, that Milton probably designed to frame an English sonnet-species which, while conforming to the metrical rules of the "Petrarchian stanza," as he calls it, should be free and unfettered by any laws

1The Sonnets of John Milton. Edited by Mark PattiKegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883.

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of intellectual arrangement. Milton, they urge, recalled the sonnet from slavery to the single theme of unhappy love-mostly, as Pattison observes, a simulated passion." In doing this—in reclaiming the sonnet from affectation and artifice to reality, simplicity, and masculine directness-he may well have wished to emancipate it still further from bondage to a minute scheme of material subdivision.

Such was, at least, the opinion of Wordsworth. In his letter to the Rev. Alex. Dyce he observes that whereas the sonnet, like every other regular composition, ought to have a beginning, a middle, and an end-or, in other words, to consist of three parts the metrical scheme sanctioned by the Italians does not agree with this notion, but rather adapts itself to a bipartite division of the subjectmatter, corresponding to the octave and the sestet. Milton, however (he goes on to say), has not acquiesced in this latter arrangement; in the majority of his sonnets the sense does not conclude with the octave, but "overflows" into the second system or sestet. "Now it has struck me," he