nets from the Portuguese will remain, what they undoubtedly now are, the noblest anthology for noble lovers which our language has to show. The singers of what may be called the Tennysonian period are many, and most of them have been sonneteers to a greater or less extent, but the field is too wide to be reaped or even tithed here. Mr. Tennyson himself has written few sonnets, and these few include one or two of his feeblest things and none of his best. No friendly critic would ever quote such an effusion as The Bridesmaid; and even the sonnet on the Montenegrins, strong and sonorous as it is, seems more like a Miltonic or Wordsworthian echo than an original strain. Mr. Tennyson's early friend Arthur Henry Hallam wrote sonnets charged with a quiet beauty; and Mr. Frederick Tennyson, as well as his brother the Rev. Charles Tennyson Turner, was a sonnet-writer needing not to be ashamed. Of the sonnet work of Alford, Faber, Clough, the younger Roscoes, John Sterling, R. S. Hawker, and many others we must not stay to speak. The sonnets of Mr. Matthew Arnold, generally devoted to the crystallization of some elevated ethical sentiment, have a simple austerity of style which may almost be called ascetic. Those of Alexander Smith, on the other hand, emulate, sometimes with fair success, the rich color and lavish imagery of Keats, who found another follower in the young Scotch poet, David Gray, whose early death robbed the world of a sweet if not of a strong singer. The sonnets of Julian Fane, particularly those addressed to his mother, are thoroughly Shaksperian both in form and flavor, and are saturated with a true and touching tenderness. Mrs. Pfeiffer's sonnets have been much admired, and justly so, for they are indeed admirable, but some of them would be even more admirable if the condensation and elaboration of the thought interfered less with the transparency of the expressional vehicle. Those of Miss Christina Rossetti have grace, sweetness, unction, with a pensive charm as of a violet growing on a grave. Miss Dora Greenwell is a disciple of Mrs. Browning, and has caught very happily some of the delicate nuances of both her feeling and style. Mr. Robert Buchanan is a poet of no mean rank, but his sonnets, though often full of his special power, impress and charm us less than some of his other work. The solitary volume of verse which we owe to Mr. Edward Dowden, though it has not been much talked about, cannot be read by any genuine lover of poetry without ardent admiration, and some of the sonnets contained in it are of singularly delicate beauty. Mr. Philip Bourke Marston and Mr. John Payne have done some very exquisite sonnet-work; but their peculiar quality is to a large extent derivative. Their master is one who has many more followers than he perhaps cares to acknowledge-a poet of fine and subtle genius, and undoubtedly the greatest of living sonneteers—Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is very unfortunate that disinterested and dispassionate criticism of some of Mr. Rossetti's most characteristic sonnets has been rendered all but impossible by the action of polemical moralists or anti-moralists, who have made them a peg on which to hang a controversy which is neither properly ethical nor properly artistic. When a critic knows that if he expresses admiration for such a sonnet as The Kiss or Nuptial Sleep, he will be denounced as fleshly or perhaps filthy, and that if, on the other hand, he says he dislikes it, he will be held up to the derision of cultured humanity as the insensate Philistine, he will probably hold his tongue, even though he may have something to say which would be worth listening to. The course which is suggested by discretion or cowardice-call it which we will-is, however, the course which at present will probably be most serviceable to true criticism; for happily Mr. Rossetti's work as a whole is too purely artistic to lend itself readily to these irritating pseudo-ethical controversies; and it is upon this whole that final judgment must be pronounced. Perhaps the most obvious positive characteristic of Mr. Rossetti's poetry is its picturesqueness. He is not merely a painter and a poet, but a painter-poet, which is a different thing. He has too true a sense of the dignity of each separate art, and of the inevitable limitations of each vehicle of expression to endeavor to paint poems or to write pictures; but his imagination is so concrete that its creations always present themselves to him as things of form and color, and his sonnets spread themselves out like fair paintings on the walls of the gallery of the mind. Every poet's instinct prompts him to embody thoughts and feelings in sensuous symbols which can be grasped by the imagination; and one of the tests by which we award precedence in the poetic hierarchy is the measure of success with which this embodiment is achieved. In Mr. Rossetti's case it is a large measure: we know of none larger, and his place is among the highest. We will not say that every one of his sonnets would provide a motive for an actual picture: both the form and color may here and there be too faintly indicated for reproduction by palpable lines and pigments; but the effect upon the mind of any one of them is analagous to that produced by one of his own glowing canvases. There are in both the same restful harmonies, the same solemn splendor, the same sad insatiate yearning, the same bounteousness of beauty; and those of us who have been privileged to behold some of those special drawings or paintings to which certain of the sonnets are avowedly twin children of the master's art, turn from the picture to the poem and from the poem back to the picture, and know not which to choose, because both are so full of all delights. Mr. Rossetti's imaginative treatment is both spiritual and impassioned, the sensuous and the super-sensuous are inextricably blended, and when love is the theme of his utterances it is a love of which we know not the body from the soul There is a noteworthy. integrity in his love sonnets which gives them a peculiar interest and value. No element is wanting, none is unduly preponderant. The poet can sing to the hautboy of the flame-winged Passion of Love, or to the sweet notes of the white-winged harpist, who is Love's Worship, declaring that "Through thine hautboy's rapturous tone The first twenty-eight of Mr. Rossetti's sonnets, like the Sonnets from the Portuguese, form a continuous series; but in the former the situations are more varied, and the gradual transition from brightness to gloom, instead of, as in Mrs. Browning's poems, from gloom to brightness, leaves us in an entirely different mood. Mr. Rossetti's genius is, however, essentially somber in tone; and even one of the earliest sonnets which are the exultant outburst of a victorious love, closes with the question of mournful passage : "O love, my love! if I no more should see How then should sound upon Life's darkening slope This somberness of effect is brought about in a strange and subtle manner. We have spoken of these sonnets as pictures, and in carrying out the comparison one may say that this effect is produced not by the use of dull colors, of browns and grays and faded tints, but rather by a miraculous mingling of rich and gorgeous hues. Mr. Ruskin has somewhere observed that good color cannot possibly be gay color, and here the color is always good, but gay never. Seldom in literature has there been such a combination of splendor and sadness, and both the splendor and the sadness are made all the more impressive by marvelous manipulative art. No poet has ever gained a greater amount of expressional effect by the mere sound quality of words, singly and in combination, than Mr. Rossetti. He has a habit, not sufficiently obtrusive to become a trick, of ending the sestette, and occasionally the octave, with a line containing some one long sonorous word of open vowels and the most producible consonants, with now and then an additional weak syllable, which prolongs the movement and gives a felt weight and solemnity. An example may be found in the lines just quoted, but there are many others : "With sweet confederate music favorable," These, and such lines as these, infringe upon sense and soul like a cannon-ball, and bury themselves so deeply in the memory that they cannot be unearthed. Then, too, Mr. Rossetti is a master of monosyllabic words, generally so hazardous both to dignity and grace, and uses them freely, often through a whole line, and sometimes through two consecutive lines, and even into a third, with no loss, but a clear gain of both literary and emotional effect. These may seem trivial things; but those to whom poetry is an art as well as an inspiration know that nothing is trivial which can be used as a means for stamping fine and enduring impressions. There was inspiration enough and to spare for the tuneful breath to which we listen in such sonnets as Love-sight, Love-sweetness, Winged Hours, Secret Parting, and Mary Magdalene; but inspiration alone would never have realized their accomplished perfectness. It is the inspi ration that masters us in such intense and somber utterances as Vain Virtues, The Sun's Shame, The Refusal of Aid between Nations, and the great and terrible Lost Days; but it is art which assures to inspiration the mastery. The man who wrote the sonnet For a Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione, which for beauty, pure, absolute, inviolate, has no equal in the volumes of any English poet, is above all things an artist; and for sonnet craftsmanship which realizes the ideal, which leaves us with the pleasant languor of supreme satisfaction, the delicious drowsiness of fulfilled delight, we know of nothing comparable to these great gifts which we owe to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. We here necessarily conclude our survey of the history of "The Sonnet in England." Our task has been a pleasant one, for the record is one of continued and beautiful growth. There seemed little promise in the Italian exotic which Sir Thomas Wyat planted in English soil, but it has flourished and blossomed and borne fruit abundantly. Arbitrary as is the form of the sonnet, its arbitrariness must be in accord with great expressional laws, or so many poets would not have chosen it as the vehicle for their finest fancies, their loftiest thoughts, their intensest emotions. This choice, made so often and vindicated so splendidly, has produced a literature within a literature, a domain within a domain, and though it is composed of scanty plots of ground, they spread over a wide expanse through which we may wander long, and yet leave many of its flowers unseen and unculled. Rich as the sonnet literature of England is now, it is becoming every day richer and fuller of potential promise, and though the possibilities of the form may be susceptible of exhaustion, there are no present signs of it, but only of new and bounteous developments. Even were no addition made to the store which has accumulated through more than two centuries, the sonnet work of our English poets would remain forever one of the most precious of the intellectual possessions of the nation. JAMES ASHCROFT NOBLE, in The Contemporary Review. LIFE IN THE HOMERIC AGE.* WHETHER Homer ever existed or not, whether the life described in the Homeric poems is a reality of earth or the fabric of a vision, are questions which may be left to serious moments; when we read Homer for enjoyment we may still believe in the blind old man as a creature of flesh and blood, and look on Nausicaa's game at ball as a form of amusement current in some early "Prehellenic" period. We may do this with a good conscience. For in any case there is and must be a large amount of realism in Homer; whatever the origin of the poems, the poets who composed them were the children of their days, with imaginations more or less limited by what they saw and knew of the world around them, or heard of as belonging to the past. Realism of this kind is inseparable from all poetry. Soar as he will in his imagination, the poet is still rooted to the earth on which he stands. However childlike his audience in an early age may be, he must not go beyond their range, and speak of things which have no meaning and reality for them, or he will cease to give pleasure, and his mission as poet is then at an end. For us, then, the Homeric age may still exist, prehistoric indeed and hardly fixed in locality, but still an age of living men and women, whose joys and sorrows, loves and hates, aspirations and thoughts, have an undying interest. Though it is the ethical rather than the religious thoughts in the poems which are of abiding value, the religious aspect of the Homeric life is nevertheless a matter of deep interest, because it is in this direction that the first conscious reflection on human existence finds utterance. Man quickly personifies the powers of Nature in some form or another, and begins to ask what is his relation to those powers. He surrounds himself with a multitude of deities, gods of the storm or the clear sky, of growth and decay, of water or fire; and to these forms of the natural world he adds the deified passions of his own nature, gods of war or love. His relations to this multitude of divine powers soon become of a complicated nature. Yet among them there emerge as of the first importance * Homer's Iliad. translated by Lord Derby. Homer's Odyssey, translated by P S. Worsley. Homer's Odyssey, done into English by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang. |