I vil good tribu pay. E to ȧi so.
The two of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed.
A chamber dear noise and blind to light.
A Post gaziand, and a weary head;

And these things, as being thine by right,
Move na try heavy grace, thou shal in me
Liveher that elsewhere Stelia's image see.

Still another sixteenth century sonneteer appears in sword and buckler, — Sir Walter Raleigh, and one begins to feel that a sonneteer is a man who can carve a foe as well as cut a cameo poem. In connection with this Memory sings mischiev ously the Enes of Emerson :

No jingling serenader's art

Nor tinkle of piano-strings
Can make the warm blood start

In its mystic springs.

Yet here is the sonnet already the poem of soldiers! It must be undergoing a transformation, for it drops the languor of a mere serenade, and thrills soon to the world-music of Shakespeare, to celestial diapasons of Milton's mind, to haunting melodies of Wordsworth's windy hills.

Raleigh's most notable sonnet is a generous tribute to his friend's "Faerie Queene."

The gentle Spenser comes "pricking o'er the plain" as another of the sonneteers of Queen Elizabeth's time. The peculiar form of his sonnets demands special attention. It is an innovation on the “English” sonnet of Surrey, the last rhyme of one quatrain following as the first rhyme of the next, and in this respect improving on Surrey's sonnets, inasmuch as more unity and rhyme-relation is given to the poem. Spenser was so success

ful in his special stanza, used in the "Faërie Queene" and now called after him, that he must needs invent a special form of sonnet for himself. This form he uses in many examples, the character of the sonnets being generally amatory, and marked by the graceful fancy, easy style, and charming picture-painting which characterize this author. The following is a fair example of Spenser's sonnets:

IN that proud port, which her so goodly graceth,
Whiles her faire face she reares up to the skie,
And to the ground her eie-lids low embaseth,
Most goodly temperature ye may descry,
Myld humblesse, mixt with awfull majestie;
For, looking on the earth, whence she was borne,
Her minde remembreth her mortalitie,
Whatso is fayrest shall to earth returne;

But that same lofty countenance seemes to scorne
Base thing, and thinke how she to heaven may clime;
Treading downe earth as lothsome and forlorne,
That hinders heavenly thoughts with drossy slime.
Yet lowly still vouchsafe to looke on me ;
Such lowlinesse shall make you lofty be.

Spenser wrote eighty-eight of these sonnets. He was born in 1552, and his death in 1599 brings us to the Seventeenth Century.

One should devote no little study to the next poet we consider, a sonnet-writer of the first magnitude, no other than William Shakespeare (1564– 1816). We have spoken of the "Shakespearean sonnet as an imitation of the Petrarcan, more easily composed but artistically inferior. Yet Shakespeare's poems in this form prove that, after

all, it is the material and workmanship, more than the exterior form of architecture, which tell for permanence in poems as in buildings. It has been inferred by good scholars that Shakespeare did not closely study contemporary Italian literature, and probably never visited Italy. The sestina rima used in his long poems is apparently his only debt in that direction as regards forms of stanza. As for the Petrarcan sonnet, it was not yet popular in England. That the sonnets were written in his younger days, and published after his retirement from the stage, is well known. Some of them are addressed apparently to a lady with whom he was enamored, but others, as the sonnets indicate, were soliloquies, and others still were addressed to a male friend. The example of Shakespeare has been the great cause of what popularity this form of sonnet retains. It may be that he knew and admired the form of the Petrarcan sonnet; yet it is not strange that, writing as voluminously as he did, and addicted to the use of simple stanzas, as shown in his poems and songs, he should have chosen the "English" form in which to write his hundred and a half of sonnets. It would have been strange, under the circumstances, had he done otherwise. And now, as we have subjected the Petrarcan system of rhymes to the test of music, one can, if he cares to, give a distinct note to each of the rhymes in an English" sonnet. But the result would be most flat and monotonous, one, two, one, two; three, four, three, four; five six, five six, seven, seven!

66

The sonnet that we quote next is so pertinent to the foregoing remarks that one cannot empha

size them better than by including it. It would seem almost as if Shakespeare had prevision of how the Petrarcan sonnet would vindicate its superiority over the vehicle he chose, and in this sonnet had written his own excuse! The italics are his own.

SONNET XXXII.

If thou survive my well-contented day,

When that churl Death my bones with dust shalt cover, And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover, Compare them with the bettering of the time;

And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.

O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought!
Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought,

To march in ranks of better equipage:

But since he died, and poets better prove,

Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love.

And, true enough, whatever the merits of their "style" or form, this uneven but collectively magnificent series of sonnets continues to be read for their rare revelation of love! Shakespeare makes still another apology in sonnet LXXVI. :

Why is my verse so barren of new pride?
So far from variation or quick change?
Why, with the time, do I not glance aside

To new-found methods and to compounds strange ?

And yet what glorious poetry has been written by Shakespeare in this form, as for instance this sonnet!

FULL many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Kissing with golden face the meadows green.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly sichemy,
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

With ugly rack on his celestial face.
And from the forlorn world his visage hide.
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine

With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth ;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sup
staineth.

Who that is familiar with the natural picture in the first four lines can forget this sonnet? But there are four pictures in it.—the morning in its glory, the day in its clouded gloom, the poet's life. in the glory of youthful feeling, and his after life stained with the inevitable impact of misfortune, sorrow, and sin; while all are bound together by the thought that love can see the lovable through the sinful, and that man must inevitably be "stained" just as the sun must be clouded. Iu deed, the poet would excuse man in the example of the mighty"heavenly sun." So much has been said because it is the editor's favorite of all thake speare's sonnets, and yet it bears in the Hunt Lave collection of sonnets this absurd caption: -

HE LAMENTS THAT THE COUNTENANCE OF SOME GREAT AND WORTHY PATRON *EEMS TO EE VIVERTED FROM HIM."