It is true that description is by no means common in the Sonnet. Few writers indeed are capable of effective description within so narrow limits. To seize the salient features of a landscape; to condense each into a few pregnant words; to print them vividly on the page by a few bold and striking touches, is a rare faculty, to which only masters of the art can lay claim. But the results under the hand of a master are proportionally marvellous. And although the direct use of the Sonnet for description must necessarily be rare, there is another most legitimate purpose of the Sonnet, in which it is of inestimable value. The function of description, as employed by the best sonnet-writers, is vividly to present the lineaments of external nature, not simply in themselves, but as suggestive of thought and as impressing the mind by analogy, and to draw from them images which speak to the imagination, to the intellect, or to the affections; and it is precisely in this power that Wordsworth's excellence, in our judgment, pre-eminently consists.

The example of Wordsworth was followed by his friend Southey, and to a more limited extent by Coleridge. Southey was himself dissatisfied with his performance in this line, and among the sonnets which he has left, takes credit for but one "thoroughly good" one, that on "Winter," as to which the reader may desire an opportunity of estimating the author's judgment:

WINTER.

A wrinkled, crabbed man they picture thee,
Old Winter, with a rugged beard as grey
As the long moss upon the apple-tree;

Blue-lipt, an ice-drop at thy sharp blue nose,

Close muffled up, and on thy dreary way

Plodding alone through sleet and drifting snows.

They should have drawn thee by the high-heapt hearth,
Old Winter! seated in thy great armed chair,
Watching the children at their Christmas mirth;
Or circled by them as thy lips declare

Some merry jest, or tale of murder dire,
Or troubled spirit that disturbs the night,
Pausing at times to rouse the mouldering fire,
Or taste the old October brown and bright.

Coleridge's few sonnets are carefully composed, and the highly poetical character of his vocabulary and his mastery of the art of versification are perhaps seen to more advantage in these short pieces than in his other poems. But he is inferior in tenderness and feeling to his gifted but unhappy son,

Hartley Coleridge, who has left a few sonnets, as, for example, "A Confession," and on "Faith," not unworthy of the very foremost rank among those of the English language.

For a time, in England the Sonnet was all but confined to the writers of this exclusive and unpopular school, by which it had been revived in this country. Hardly one of the poets of the beginning of the century was found to imitate the example. Neither Moore nor Scott seems to have written a single sonnet. Campbell, for whose love of elaborate finish and painstaking habits of composition the Sonnet might be expected to have a special charm, is equally barren. Crabbe, whose taste for homely subjects and remarkable powers of detailed description would have found ample room for display in this field, seems never to have been attracted towards it. To Byron, as we already saw, it was especially distasteful, although the five sonnets which he did write are, both in matter and in form, of the very highest merit. Rogers's classic pen might have admirably adapted itself, one would suppose, to the requirements of this artificial composition; but, if he ever attempted it at all, he appears never to have satisfied his own fastidious tastes so far as to venture upon publication.

Of the poets of that generation, the only names which can be recalled in connection with the Sonnet are those of Henry Kirke White, who left a few not ungraceful specimens; his unhappy namesake, Joseph Blanco White, for whose wellknown "Night and Death" Coleridge could "remember no rival except in Milton and Wordsworth"; Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and above all, Shelley and Keats. In the two last-named poets there is considerable irregularity of structure; indeed, some of Keats's sonnets are written on the Shakespearian type; but in his sonnets, as well as Shelley's, we forget deviation from classical models in the beauty of the imagery, the richness of the illustrations, the graceful ease and dignity of the language, and above all, the compressed thoughtfulness, and strong but subdued emotion. Keats's sonnets on "Chapman's Homer," "The Human Seasons," and "Sleep," are too well known to be recalled here; but we have referred to him in company with Leigh Hunt and Shelley, on account of a remarkable trial of skill in sonnetwriting which took place between them, and of which Mr. Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), in his "Life of Keats,"* gives an account, quoting a letter of Keats "to my dear brother," dated Hampstead, Feb. 16th [1818]. The

* Vol. i. p. 91.

Wednesday before last," Keats writes, "Shelley, Hunt, and I wrote each a sonnet on the Nile. Some day you shall read them all." Lord Houghton prints as the result three sonnets, which we shall here reproduce-all eminently characteristic of the authors :

THE NILE.

BY JOHN KEATS.

Son of the old moon-mountains African!
Stream of the Pyramid and Crocodile !
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing's inward span :
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Those men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest them a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err! They surely do ;
'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew
Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sun-rise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

THE NILE.

BY LEIGH HUNT.

It flows through old hush'd Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream;
And times and things, as in that vision, seem

Keeping along it their eternal stands,—
Caves, pillars, pyramids, the shepherd bands

That roamed through the young earth, the glory extreme

Of high Sesostris, and that southern beam,

The laughing queen that caught the world's great hands.

Then comes a mightier silence, stern and strong,

As of a world left empty of its throng,

And the void weighs on us; then we awake,
And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
'Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
Our own calm journey on for human sake.

J. K.

L. H.

Lord Houghton subjoins, as Shelley's contribution to the competition, the sonnet on Ozymandias :—

OZYMANDIAS.

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

;

This, however, is plainly a mistake. Beyond the general relation to the land of the Nile, Egypt, the sonnet on Ozymandias has no such connection with the proposed subject as could identify it with this trial of skill; and if any doubt could have been entertained on the matter, it has been removed by the discovery among the unpublished MSS. of Shelley in the hands of Mr. Townshend Maher, of the following sonnet on the Nile-beyond all possible doubt the sonnet produced by him in this contest with his friends..

THE NILE.

BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

Month after month the gathered rains descend,
Drenching yon secret Ethiopian dells,

And from the Desert's ice-girt pinnacles,

Where Frost and Heat in strange embraces blend

On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.

Girt then with blasts and meteors, Tempest dwells
By Nile's aërial urn, with rapid spells
Urging its waters to their mighty end.

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level,

And they are thine, O Nile! and well thou knowest

That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil,

And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest.
Beware, O man! for knowledge must to thee,
Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.*

In connection with this interesting trial of skill, the reader will be amused by a similar contest between two of the rival poets, Keats and Leigh Hunt, which had the additional ele

66

"

*This interesting relic appeared in the "St. James's Magazine," March, 1876, and was immediately recognized by a critic in the Academy as Shelley's contribution to the friendly trial of skill described by Mr. Monckton Milnes. The "St. James's Magazine," April, 1876, acquiesces unhesitatingly in the suggestion (p. 109).

ment of interest that it was a time-trial. The subject proposed

was

THE GRASSHOPPER AND THE CRICKET.

KEATS.

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead :
That is the grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,-he has never done
With his delights, for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never;

On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from our stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

LEIGH HUNT.

Green little vaulter in the sunny grass,
Catching your heart up at the feel of June,
Sole voice that's heard amidst the lazy noon
When even the bees lag at the summoning brass;
And you, warm little housekeeper, who class
With those who think the candles come too soon,
Loving the fire, and with your tricksome tune
Nick the glad silent moments as they pass;

Oh! sweet and tiny cousins, that belong,

One to the fields, the other to the hearth,

Both have your sunshine; both, though small, are strong
At your clear hearts; and both seem given to earth
To ring in thoughtful ears this natural song-

Indoors and out, summer and winter, Mirth.

But we have already outrun the space allotted to us for the present; and we must reserve to our next publication the sequel of the history.