order, but they are the earliest in the language that breathe what may be called the habit of mind observable in the best Italian writers of sonnets; that is to say, a mixture of tenderness, elegance, love of country, seclusion, and conscious sweetness of verse. We scent his "muskèd eglantines," listen to his birds, and catch glimpses of the "sweet hermitress" whose loss he deplored. Drummond was not without the faults of prototypes inferior to those writers. His Italian scholarship in some measure seduced, as well as inspired him; but upon the whole his taste was excellent; and he leaves upon his readers the impression of an elegant-minded and affectionate man.

Drummond, though an extreme, was an honest Tory. He wrote bitterly on the crimes of the Court of James the First; though he sided vehemently with Charles in the civil wars. Milton took as vehement a part on the other side. Both these poets, however, might have met on the beautiful neutral ground of poetry, and compared sonnets and Italian books. One touch of Sonnet makes all parties kin.

If a complete specimen of the legitimate sonnet in all its demands, both of uniformity and variety, could have been expected of any English poet, Milton was the man ; for he was a poet willing to show his learning; he was a musician; and he could write sonnets, as we have seen, in their native language. Yet it is remarkable that, although all the sonnets of Milton, English as well as Italian, are of the legitimate order, and though he was an honored guest in Italy at the time when the reaction was beginning to take place in favor of its purest and best writers, he has hardly left us one in which the received

rules respecting the division of quatrain and terzettes are not broken, and the music of the whole fourteen lines merged into a strain of his own. The strains, except in one particular, are good; most of the sonnets good; some of them noble and beautiful; one of them rejoices in the recollection of "Tuscan airs," and it might be supposed that the writer would have modulated his notes accordingly, and shown what variations he could make of his own, after the Tuscan manner.

Not so. The sonnets are entirely such as I have described, with this unmusical and therefore remarkable deterioration, that they are unhappy and monotonous in their rhymes. Few of them, either English or Italian, are exempt from this fault. The two most affecting sonnets the one on the Massacre of Piedmont, and that on his Deceased Wife- are so full of them that a writer of Spanish asonantes would say that they had but two rhymes throughout. The two quatrains of the latter sonnet give us no rhymes but in a, and the terzettes none but in i. (Saint, grave, gave, faint, taint, save, have, restraint, mind, sight, shined, delight, inclined, might.) Criticisms on rhymes appear trifling and hypercritical, and in the case of long poems would be so; but they are otherwise in respect to compositions that are at once so brief and so full of musical requirement as sonnets.

Most affecting, nevertheless, are those two sonnets; noble the one on the Assault Intended to the City; charming the Invitation to Lawrence; and masterly in passages

all the rest.

"Soul-animating strains-alas! too few."

Why did not Milton write a sonnet on every cheerful,

mournful, and exalting event in his life? Why do not all poets do so? I mean, when they are not too happy or too unhappy to speak. What new and enchanting volumes of biography we should possess !

With Milton the sonnet disappeared from English poetry for nearly a hundred years. The unromantic school of French poetry, which came into England with the restoration of Charles II., put an end to that of the Italians; and the sonnet fell into such disrepute, for a still longer period, that it has not been set quite right perhaps, even yet, with the "reading public." The countenance that was given it towards the close of the last century, by sequestered scholars like Gray and Warton, availed it little. At the beginning of the century, Pope, in his "Essay on Criticism," said of a supposed despicable performance by a "person of quality,"

"What woful stuff this madrigal would be

In some starved hackney sonneteer, or me!"

and towards the close of the century, Johnson, sneering at Warton's poetry, not without an insinuation against that of Gray, says, that wheresoe'er he turns his "view,"

"All is old and nothing new;

Tricked in antique ruff and bonnet,

Ode, and elegy, and sonnet."

Johnson little suspected, that before half the next century was over, his own poetry would be thought staleness itself compared with that of Gray; and as little did Pope suspect that a professed sonneteer - Wordsworth - would be looked upon by many persons as the greatest English poet since the time of Milton.

The sonnet, in truth, as a form of poetry, is disre

spected by none but those who are unacquainted with its requirements; and had not the poets and wits of the reign of Anne been ignorant of Southern literature to a degree which is surprising, considering their love of books, — nay, had they not even been unacquainted, or at least unfamiliar, with the miscellaneous effusions of the greater English poets who preceded them, they would have blushed to make a by-word of a species of verse which, with more or less attention to its laws, had been cultivated by all the greatest poets of Europe, those of their own nation included.

The sonnet rose again, like a transient promise in spring, or like a morning at once ruddy and weeping, in the solitary one by Gray on the death of his friend West. Wordsworth, in a spirit of hypercriticism which it is a pity he had not spared for his own sake, found fault with what he called the artificial language of this sonnet, and with the introduction of "Phoebus, lifting his golden fire." As if a man so imbued with the classics as Gray, and lamenting the loss of another man equally so imbued, whose intercourse with him was full of such images, could not speak from his heart in such language! Similar fault. which it might have been thought would have warned Wordsworth off such ungenial ground had been found by Johnson with Milton's classical lament of a deceased friend and fellow-student, in the beautiful poem of "Lycidas." Not only did Milton and Gray speak from the heart on these occasions, but perhaps, had they not both so written, they had not spoken so well. They would not have used language so accordant with the habits of their intercourse. And the image in Gray's sonnet is beautiful for its own sake, and beautifully put :

"In vain to me the smiling mornings shine,

And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire."

We are too much in the habit of losing a living notion of the sun; and a little Paganism, like this, helps, or ought to help, to remind us of it. More particularly ought this to have been the case with Wordsworth, who, when it suited him, wished to have been "suckled in a creed outworn,” and to have

66 'Sight of Proteus coming from the sea,"

rather than witness round about him the belief in nothing but every-day worldliness. "Phœbus," in this instance, is not a word out of the dictionaries, but a living celestial presence.*

*I was surprised to find the other day, in reading a passage of his Biographia Literaria, which had escaped my memory, that Coleridge, though he differs in other respects with the criticism of Wordsworth on Gray's sonnet, and indeed with the particular ground of objection to this line about Phoebus, finds fault with it still more severely on another, affirming that it has "almost as many faults as words." He accuses it of "incongruous images," of confusion of cause with effect, or "the real thing with the personified representative of the thing," in short, of difference from "the language of good sense." It is unpleasant to differ on a point of criticism with Coleridge; but I must do so in this instance, even to the extent of retorting his own words; for the charge appears to me "incongruous" with what he, as well as Wordsworth, thought of Johnson's charge against "Lycidas"; it confounds a warrantable use of the Pagan image with ordinary commonplace, assuming at the same time that the epithet "reddening" was intended to be understood in the neuter, and not the active, sense of the participle; and finally, on all these accounts, it differs from the "language of good sense." Coleridge's criticism in general was as subtle and beautiful as his poetry; and I should dissent from it in this instance with becoming diffidence, if it had not been inconsistent with its own spirit and its own letter.