of rimes in the middle of the second quatrain. Instead of a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, he has a, b, b, a, a, c, c, a. And yet although he ventured upon his departure from the form, he retained the same vowel-sound in the middle of both quatrains, key and melody in the first, and grief and leaf in the second. It seems dimly possible that as he had emphasized the long e sound in the first quatrain, he may have thought that the ear would catch this same long e in grief and leaf, and that he was satisfied with this repetition, neglecting or unwittingly eliminating the insignificant ƒ which follows the long e in the second quatrain. It was hard always for Wordsworth to put on the fetters of any fixed form; he had a tendency to lawlessness of structure; he was wilful in going his own way in his own fashion; and it may be that he had a vague consciousness of this, which, as Lowell suggested, made him welcome the restraint of the sonnet. Nobility of thought was his by gift of nature, and elevation of outlook; but in the minor matters of technic he needed some outside stimulus to keep him up to the mark of his highest achievement.

To the two sonnets on the sonnet already quoted here may be added a third by Rossetti, inferior to Wordsworth's in its imagination no doubt, but superior in its technic:

A Sonnet is a moment's monument,

Memorial from the Soul's eternity

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fulness reverent:

Carve it in ivory or in ebony,

As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see

Its flowering crest impearl'd and orient.

A Sonnet is a coin; its face reveals

The soul, its converse, to what power 't is due:

Whether for tribute to the august appeals

Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,

It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pays the toll of Death.

It is especially in the sonnet that Longfellow revealed his mastery of verse; and he was prone to keep to the strict letter of the law, taking no liberties with the form, and preferring to use three rimes in the sestet, as he did in this on "Nature"

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted

By promises of others in their stead,

Which, though more splendid, may not please him

more;

So Nature deals with us, and takes away

Our playthings one by one, and by the hand

Leads us to rest so gently, that we go

Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,

Being too full of sleep to understand

How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

Longfellow's intuitive feeling led him to avoid the terminal couplet. Probably he would have agreed with Aldrich in holding that the strict Italian arrangement "with its interwoven rimes, its capacity for expressing subtle music is an instrument as superior to the English form as the harp or the guitar is superior to the banjo; and I fancy that most workers in this kind of verse will agree with me. The alternate lines riming, and closing with a couplet, gave the poet the command of some of the richest melodic effects within the reach of English versification. The sonnet that ends with a

couplet misses that fine unrolling of music which belongs to the sonnet proper. The couplet brings the reader up with a jerk. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the couplet has the snap of a whip-lash, and turns the sonnet into an epigram. To my thinking, this abruptness hurts many of Shakspere's beautiful poems of fourteen lines-for they are simply that. One must go to Milton, and Wordsworth, and Keats (in three instances) in order to find the highest development of the English sonnet.'

In fact, it seems to be the opinion of most of the later poets of our language that if the game is to be played at all, it is best to follow the rules without cavil and without claiming any license to depart from them. There is no obligation on any poet to make use of the sonnet framework; and if he would express himself without restraint he has at his command the large liberty of all the other lyrical forms. It is in the rigidity of its skeleton that the charm of the sonnet is solidly rooted. It tends to impose a helpful condensation, thus counteracting the temptation to diffuseness. Except for the narrow limits within which the acceptance of the form has restricted it, many a poem that "would have been but a loose nebulous vapor has been compressed and rounded into a star," so Trench declared; "the sonnet, like a Grecian temple, may be limited in its scope, but like that, if successful, it is altogether perfect."

Tennyson said to a friend that "a sonnet arrests the free sweep of genius, and if poets were to keep to it, it would cripple them; but it is a fascinating kind of verse, and to excel in it is a rare distinction." And when his companion suggested that the last line should

form the climax, both of thought and of expression, and that the whole should be like a wave breaking on the shore, Tennyson declared that "the whole should show a continuous advance of thought and movement, like a river fed by rillets, as every great poem should."

The sonnet is thus seen to be not only a form of verse, deliberately accepted and conscientiously filled, it is also a special type of poem, because it must have an absolute unity of its own. It must have its single and simple theme, lofty and yet not too large for its frame but exactly commensurate with this. It must move in every line toward its inevitable conclusion, which shall be full and satisfactory to the ear and to the mind. It must be ample and yet reticent; and it must have sustained sonority, culminating impressively in the final line. It must be impeccable, beyond all other verse, in the easy perfection of its rhythm, its meter, and its rime, with an avoidance of all dissonance and jingle, and with an artful contrast of the vowel-sounds in all of its four or five rimes. Above all, it must be not only continuous but clear in its central thought, since the form itself is complicated, and therefore the ear must not have to strain itself also to ascertain the poet's message. Lowell praised Longfellow's sonnets especially for this quality of clarity: "they remind me of one of those cabinets we sometimes see, in which many drawers are unlocked by a single key. I have seen sonnets in which there is a separate lock, I may say, for every line, and in fumbling among our fourteen keys we find ourselves sometimes in certain confusion. Added to this there would be sometimes the conundrum of secret drawers."

This limpidity of Longfellow is displayed beautifully

in one of his sonnets on the "Divina Commedia” of

Oft have I seen at some cathedral door

A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor
Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er;
Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,

And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate

To inarticulate murmurs dies away,

While the eternal ages watch and wait.

This is noble in tone and lofty in its simple imagery. There is special felicity in the richness imparted to the versification by the polysyllables in the second half. But, if a blemish must be sought, it can be found in the use of the same vowel-sound in both of the rimes of the sestet. The long a in gate, disconsolate and wait reappears in day, pray and away; and this is not entirely pleasing to the ear, if, indeed, it is not even a little confusing.

The rigorous limitation to fourteen lines of prescribed and equal length, the restriction of the rimes to four or five as the case may be, the intricate arrangement of these rimes according to the Petrarchan pattern, and the avoiding of the terminal couplet,all these requirements unite to make the sonnet seem like a difficult form. And yet this very difficulty may be an advantage. Every true artist finds his profit in a resolute grapple with technical obstacles, a struggle which forces him to take the utmost pains and to put