The Sonnet as a Refiner. 37 within definite and very contracted limits taught them conciseness and accuracy; and the difficult construction of their stanzas forced them to atone for the frequent imperfections of their rhymes by a strict attention to the harmony of their metre. Although, from their contempt of what they thought the rustic and sordid poverty of our early language, they often adopted a cumbrous and gaudy magnificence of diction, they accumulated the ore which has been refined by their successors, and provided the materials for future selection. *** In a few happy instances they anticipated the taste of posterity, and attained that polished elegance of expression which results from general simplicity and occasional splendor.' To which sensible and acute criticism I will add, that what was true of the sonnet as a refiner and polisher of our poetical literature in that early day before the advent of Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare had made it glorious-has remained true of it in every succeeding generation. It has ever disciplined the taste and cultivated the ear; it has always chastened, invigorated, and given precision to language; it has uniformly trained the intellect to strict habits of condensation and concentration, and given point, exactitude, and clearness to expression. The sonnet puts a hook in the unwieldy jaws of tedious garrulity and vagabond diffuseness; and it remains to-day at once the most improving exercise of the tyro, and the severest and most exacting test of the master in the art.” "Verily, Professor," I exclaimed, "almost thou persuadest me to be a sonneteer! Seriously, old friend, I have been entertained and instructed; and I would gladly listen till you exhausted your budget. But see! the moon is sailing up the sky; and, leaving what more is to be said for another quiet afternoon, we must be setting our faces homeward, else your good wife and mine will be rousing the neighbors to search for their lost or mislaid husbands." our wives and tea, let me repeat a stately sonnet of Sir Philip Sidney's to the moon, suggested to my memory by your true poet's phrase, 'The moon is sailing up the sky.' Listen to the immortal hero of Zutphen: "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies! How silently, and with how wan a face! What, may it bee, that ev'n in heavenly place Is constant Love deem'd there but want of wit? Do they above, love to be lov'd, and yet Those lovers scorn, whom that Love doth profess? When the Professor closed the last resounding line of this delightful sonnet, he lay silent for a moment, as if lost in pensive thought; then, knocking the ashes from his pipe against a friendly stump, he rose, and, putting his arm in mine, we turned our faces homeward with a silence that we both felt to be truly "silvern." Ir was nearly a week before the Professor and myself found leisure to renew our afternoons with the poets; but we were fully compensated for the enforced delay by one of those genial and rarely beautiful days which are the crown and glory of our American summer. The sky was of that deep transparent blue which gives an impression of fathomless depth; a few vast cloud-cushions, hung high in air and white as virgin silver, moved almost imperceptibly over the arched bosom of the ether; the sun shone brightly, and with just enough fervor to make the cool shade of our favorite oak an acceptable retreat; the air was crisp, elastic, so breezy as to set leaf and shrub everywhere in motion, and yet so bland and gentle that an uncovered babe might have slumbered safely, pillowed on the sweet soft grass beside us. When I reached our rendezvous, I found the Professor already there, so precisely in the attitude he was in when we opened our chat the week before, that it required only a slight effort to fancy that we were re-enacting some sleeping or waking dream of the past, and instinctively there floated on my memory Tennyson's lines: "We muse and brood, And ebb into a former life, or seem To states of mystical similitude.” |