known critics, assigning to certain sonnets or groups of sonnets a supremacy, the notes of which are anything but easy to discover; and we are driven to the conclusion that a great deal of sonnet criticism resembles the criticism of artistically uneducated visitors to picture galleries, who, after confessing that they are quite ignorant of painting, and only know what they like, do not hesitate to commit themselves to the most uncompromising and unguarded estimates. Without doubt the first fact to be remembered in formulating canons of sonnet criticism is that a sonnet is a poem, and that, whatsoever it lacks, it must at any rate possess the qualities without which no poem can be admirable. The presentation of the motive, whether intellectual or emotional, must be adequate ; its treatment must be imaginative; and the language in which it is embodied must be entirely transparent and musical-chosen with such unerring instinct as to leave the impression that there can have been no choice, that every word has an inevitableness which forbids the supposition that any other might have taken its place. But a good sonnet must be something more than fourteen lines of good poetry it must fulfill its peculiar conditions of being, both structural and vital. Of the former we have already spoken; the latter it is a more difficult task to specify without falling into commonplace, or drifting into what bears the semblance of dogmatism. The one thing most needful in the sonnet is what may be called impressive unity. We do not, with Mr. Main, think it absolutely essential that it should be an utterance of one thought or one emotion, for within its bounds one thought may be opposed by another, and one emotion set against its opposite; but it is essential that the impression left by the sonnet as a whole shall be thoroughly homogeneous-that as it approaches its close the varying threads, if there have been such, should be twined together, and that the reader should be made to feel that the whole commends, amalgamates, and glorifies all the parts-that every part is indeed but a member of a vital organism. Take as an illustration a sonnet of Wordsworth's, unequaled among his many sonnets for tender beauty, though surpassed by a few in insistent power and mastering splendor

"It is a beauteous evening calm and free;

The ho y time is quie 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 untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
And w rship'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not."

Now, there can be no doubt that this sonnet has that impressive unity which, as we have said, the form pre-eminently demands; but it is the unity which comes not of the expression of one mood, but of the discovery of a spiritual ground common to two moods which seem diverse and, at first sight, even inconsistent-the emotion roused in the mind of the philosophical poet by the beating against his heart of the great heart of Nature, and the apparent apathy of the young girl who steps beside him, seemingly untouched by solemn thought. True, at the beginning of the sestette the continuity of thought appears to be broken, but we are only led off along a returning curve, and when we reach the close we compass for the first time the outline of the inspiring conception which informs every line of this perfect poem.

This sonnet cannot fail to remind us of the question to which two opposing answers have been quoted, as to whether in this form of composition it is or is not desirable that we should be led on to a point or climax. Most readers, whether critical or uncritical, will agree with the first of the two verdicts-that the sonnet, like the plant which blooms in our gardens, should vindicate its right to be by the bright consummate flower which comes as the fulfillment of its promise, the culmination of its life. It is impossible, however, to lay down rules as to whether it is better that the wave of poetic emotion should gently lap or tempestuously break upon its shores; whether the sound left lingering in our ears by high poetry should be a shrill trumpet-blast or a dying fall of harp-like melody; for the winds of the spirit blow as they list, and Art, like Wisdom, is justified of her children. Still, one thing at least may be said without pedantic dogmatism-that the sonnet should, as it proceeds, gain strength and momentum instead of losing them; that its latest lines should, in sense, in sound, or in both, reach a nobler altitude than its earlier ones; and that it should leave with us a sense of victorious accomplishment, not of vague dissatisfaction. This may sometimes be achieved without anything that can with truth be called a climax: it is so achieved in Milton's great sonnet On the late Massacres in Piedmont; but even there the poet's instinct compels him to conclude with a line so weighty and sonorous that it reminds us of an avalanche thundering down the side of one of his "Alpine mountains cold." Exaggerated straining after point and climax is bad, but so is similar straining after any kind of artistic effect; and if Wordsworth did, as his critic says he did studiously avoid to avail himself of one of the most legitimate means of stamping on a reader's mind a sharp and permanent impression of the thought or mood he was moved to utter, he was guilty of an offense equally reprehensible; he was a Philistine binding only too effectually the Samson of song in the green withs of scholastic theory.

The division of the sonnet into two unequal parts, a division

which our best sonnet-writers have shown an increasing disposition to maintain, is, in itself, an indication of the true mode of treatment. The first eight lines, technically the octave, seem as if they might be intended for a broad exposition of the motive; the last six, the sestette, for a special application of it. Here is a sonnet of Mr. Matthew Arnold's exemplifying this method of handling :

WORDLY PLACE.

"Even in a palace, life may be led well!
So spoke the imperial sage, purest of men,
Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den
Of common life, where crowded up pell-mell,
Our freedom for a little bread we sell,
And drudge under some foolish master's ken,
Who rates us if we peer outside our pen--
Matched with a palace, is not this a hell!
Even in a palace! On his truth sincere
Who spake these words, no shadow ever came;
And when my ill-schooled spirit is aflame
Some nobler, ampler stage of life to win,

I'll stop and say: "There were no succor here!
The aids to noble life are all within.' ""

In this sonnet a general statement of great ethical facts of life is followed by a personal appropriation which brings them home. In another, by the same poet, the process is reversed; it begins with the individual instance and passes from it to the universal lesson. The thought is a fine one, and the treatment singularly beautiful and satisfying.

EAST LONDON.

"'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead
Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green.
And the pale weaver, through his window seen

In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited;

I met a preacher there 1 knew, and said:

'Ill and o'er-worked, how fare you in this scene?'

'Bravely!' said he, for I of late have been

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.'
O human soul! so long as thou canst so

Set up a mark of everlasting light

Above the howling senses' ebb and flow,

To cheer thee and to right thee if thou roam,

Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night!

Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home."

In numerous instances, however, even where the formal division is retained, there is no such perceptible break or turn as in any of the sonnets we have quoted. The theme of the octave may be prolonged through the sestette, but there will be a subtle difference of treatment. It will be carried on in a slightly changed key, or in slower or quicker tune; and in most sonnets of the highest class the sestette will probably be either a completion, concentration, or gathering together of the subject-matter of the octave, or a return

upon it from some new and untried point of approach, thus giving to a familiar thought or fancy the magnetic charm of which we thought accustomed wont and use had for ever deprived it. Nor is it probable that there will ever be a total failure of writers who will treat the sonnet as a simple unity, the two parts melting into one another and ceasing to be separately distinguishable, as they do in the supreme achievement of Milton, and in some of the most perfect and unapproachable efforts of Mrs. Browning and Mr. Rossetti, such as Substitution and the sonnet For a Venetian Pastoral. For evermore in matters like these the mighty masters will be a law unto themselves, and the validity of their legislation will be attested and held against all comers by the splendor of an unchallengeable

success.

Perhaps all has been said that needs to be said concerning the peculiar qualities of the sonnet; for, as we have said, many of its requirements are only what would be the requirements of any brief poem charged with the adequate treatment of a single theme. It must have an imaginative completeness which leaves us serenely satisfied; it must have an artistic perfectness which shall stand the test of that frequent and loving examination to which, in virtue of its very brevity, it makes a claim; it must have its every line strong, its every word harmonious: it must be concentrated yet clear, compact yet fluent ; and while every phrase and image is in itself a joygiving thing of beauty, every member must remain in sweet subordination to the total effect and impression of the whole.

One might almost assume without examination that even among the thousands of English sonnets there would be found comparatively few which fulfill all the conditions of so elaborate and exigent a form of verse. The text of Mr. Main's Treasury contains 463 sonnets, chosen with true discrimination, and representing the highest achievement of every English sonneteer who had passed away before the close of the year 1879; but it would not be maintained by any critic, or even by the compiler himself, that more than a very small proportion of these can be classed among the flaw. less pearls of poetry. It may be doubted if before the time of Milton we have a single sonnet which, as a sonnet and not merely as a fourteen-line poem, can be praised without implicit limitations and reserves. No amiable person will be inclined to think harshly of editorial enthusiasm, or to blame severely the critic who believes he has rescued from oblivion the work of an undeservedly neglected genius; but as a rule, ultimate fame is fairly proportioned to desert, and if a writer has been forgotten, the presumption is, that whatever be the merits or beauties of his work, its loss of hold upon the memory of mankind is but one example of the operation of the law of the survival of the fittest. Sir Thomas Wyat's sonnets were of the true Italian type, and occasionally, as in the sonnet

"Divers doth use, as I have heard and know,"

he attains that charm, a compound of ingenuity and grace, in which
few cultured writers of his day were deficient. But this is all;
there is a total lack of positive virtue, of quality, of distinction:
nor in passing from his work to that of his compeer, the Earl of
Surrey, do we make any change for the better, but remain in the
same atmosphere of respectable commonplace. Indeed, among the
courtly versifiers of the period-the mob of gentlemen who wrote
with dignity rather than with ease-we only find one, Sir Philip
Sidney, whose sonnet work rises above this dead level, and though
Charles Lamb can hardly be acquitted of loving exaggeration when
he says that the best of Sidney's sonnets "are among the best of
their sort," they are certainly a refreshing oasis in a desert where
nothing grew but sterile flowers of strained sentiment, fantastic
phrase, and far-fetched imagery. Not that Sidney is free from the
conceits of his age; his verse is, as Lamb says, "stuck full of
amorous fancies," which the genial essayist celebrates affectionate
ly on the ground that "True Love thinks no labor to send out
thoughts upon the vast and more than Indian voyages, to bring
home rich pearls, outlandish wealth, gems, jewels, spicery, to
sacrifice in self depreciating similitudes as shadows of true amis-
bilities in the Beloved." Sidney's conceits, however, are human-
ized; they glow instead of merely sparkling, and we do not simply
see the versifier in them, but feel the gentle, tender, chivalro is
humanity behind them. Now and then he abandons them alto
'gether, and his thought and language acquire the sweet natural-
ness and spontaneity which were the dower of both an earlier and
a later age, but which in his time were for the court poet's lost
gifts, as in the following sonnet, which it seems strange should not
have found a place among the other jewels embedded in the setting
of Elia's golden eulogy. Perhaps it looked too much like an Eng-
lish pebble to consort well with the spoils of those "more than In-
dian voyages."

"Because I breathe not love to every one,
Nor do not use set colors for to wear,
Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
Nor give each speech the full point of a groan,
The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
Of them who in their lips Love's s andard bear,-
'What he say they of me; now I dare swear
He cannot love. No, no, let him alone'
And think so stil, if Stella know my mind!
Profess indeed I do not Cupid's art;

But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find
That this right badge is but worn in the heart:

Dumb swans, not chattering pies, do lovers prove:
They love indeed who quake to say they love."

Another reason for the exclusion of this sonnet from Lamb's selected twelve may be found in its occasional lapses from perfect expressional grace, several of the lines being, to say the least, sus