in form and trivial in spirit, and again memorably fine. The French sonnet has usually an octave of Petrarcan arrangement and a sestet of three rhymes, the first two lines rhyming together in a couplet. Bellay, Ronsard, and others helped to foster the sonnet at first in France. Felix Arvers has written a celebrated sonnet, "Mon ame a son secret," and De Musset inscribed one of pleasing quality to Victor Hugo. The grace and courtliness of the spirit of old Pierre Ronsard is embalmed in a sonnet, of which there follows a faithful and clever translation, by Miss Katherine Hillard, not heretofore published. Béranger and Thackeray have both paraphrased the sonnet, which is as follows:

TO HÉLÈNE.

WHEN by the fire, grown old, with silv'ry hair, You spin by candle-light, with weary eyes, Humming my songs, you'll say with still surprise, "Ronsard once sang of me when I was young and fair." Then as your maidens hear the well-known sound, Though half asleep after the toils of day, Not one but wakes, and, as she goes her way, Blesses your name, with praise immortal crowned. I shall be dead and gone, a fleshless shade, Under Elysian bowers my head be laid;

While you, crouched o'er your fire, grown old and

gray,

Sigh for my love, regret your past disdain.

Live now, nor wait for love to come again, Gather the roses of your life to-day!

(PIERRE RONSARD.)

The genius of Camoens makes the sonnet a perennial delight in Portuguese literature, where

over three hundred appear of is compositioL has bloomed since the sixteenti cenu

under the tendance of no less & ant tumn 201 de Vega, one of whose somers must

here:

SHEPHERD! Who viti tie amorous syivan song
Hast broken the slumber that encompasset me.
Who mad's thy croot from the accurset tres
On which thy power arms were stredet sto
Lead me to mercy's ever-loving ioumans

For thou my shepherd guart ant grune dist
I will obey tay voice and want as

Thy feet a beautiu upon the moumane
Hear, Shepherd: tuo vin for ty huet an dying
O, wash away these seamen sie i tuoi
Rejoicest at the enutrite smeer † vow.
O. wait to thee wy veur soul # ***ng
Wait for me" To win at 1. vien I set
With feet mallied to the USE. L

me:

Here, too, is an exelent translation of a wOTIDEST by Camoens practing the eye of a norEZŁ. Catarina Cormare, who has reserved & die woone in Mrs. Browning's poem.

ever seen."

SONNET ET CAMDEN TOW

Or wins inte a crests Anur tri

THOSE exer from whence chante lone was wont to glow, And smiled to see his toretes kindled there: That face within whose beauty strange and rare The rosy light of dawn gleamed o'er the snow;

That hair which bid the envious sun to know

His brightest beams less golden rays did wear; That pure white hand, that gracious form and fair, — All these into the dust of earth must go.

O perfect beauty in its tenderest age!

O flower cut down ere it could all unfold

By the stern hand of unrelenting Death! Why did not Love itself quit Earth's poor stage, Not because here dwelt beauty's perfect mould, But that so soon it passed from mortal breath? (TRANSLATED BY T. W. HIGGINSON.)

Nor was the sonnet neglected in German literature, when that literature was at its best. Goethe's sonnets are charming to read, not only in the original but in the translations of Bowring, and it is amusing to hear him, when nearly sixty, acknowledge his surrender to the sonnet as follows:

NEMESIS.

-

WHEN through the nations stalks contagion wild,
We from them cautiously should steal away.
E'en I have oft with ling'ring and delay
Shunn'd many an influence, not to be defiled.

And e'en though Amor oft my hours beguiled,
At length with him preferr'd I not to play,
And so, too, with the wretched sons of clay,
When four and three lined verses they compiled.

But punishment pursues the scoffer straight,
As if by serpent-torch of furies led

From hill to vale, from land to sea to fly.

I hear the genie's laughter at my fate;
Yet do I find all power of thinking fled
In sonnet-rage and love's fierce ecstasy.

been. But if there were any Italian sonnets in England in Chaucer's day, they were as yet a strange bird, and the poet probably did not know them.

So we come down to Sir Thomas Wyatt (15031542), the cotemporary of Casa in Italy, for the first English sonnet-writer. He wrote thirty-two sonnets, only one being other than in Petrarcan form, though slightly irregular in their closing couplets. Sir Thomas and his young friend, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), had traveled in Italy, and so had become enamored of the sonnet. But the younger man immediately forsook the Petrarcan model, and wrote either all on two rhymes, except the ending couplet, or else in the form generally known as the "English" or Shakespearean sonnet. Had he foreborne to write the fatal sonnet, "On the Life and Death of Sardanapalus," he might not have excited the anger of King Henry VIII. and lost his head at the age of thirty. One cannot but sincerely lament this young knight, whose poetic relics are embalmed in Tottle's Miscellany, "The Songs and Sonnettes written by the ryght honourable lorde Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, and other."

แ

Here is one of Surrey's sonnets, and it deserves attention because we now first strike the "Shakespearean" sonnet in literature. This form is also called often the "illegitimate" illegitimate" sonnet, though there are more irregular forms that better deserve the name!