We sang together softly, to enrich

The poor world with the sense of love, and witch
The heart out of things evil, I am strong,

Knowing ye are not lost for aye among

The hills with last year's thrush. God keeps a niche In Heaven to hold our idols; and albeit

He brake them to our faces, and denied

That our close kisses should impair their white, I know we shall behold them raised, complete, The dust shook off their beauty, glorified,

New Memnons singing in the great God-light.

From so well-known a poet we turn to one little read on this side of the water, Alexander Smith (1830-1867). His sonnets on Christmas are full of the season's feeling, and the following seems a pleasant echo of Keats :

BEAUTY.

BEAUTY still walketh on the earth and air:
Our present sunsets are as rich in gold
As ere the Iliad's music was out-rolled,

The roses of the Spring are ever fair,

'Mong branches green still ring-doves coo and pair,

And the deep sea still foams its music old;

So if we are at all divinely souled,

This beauty will unloose our bonds of care.

"T is pleasant when blue skies are o'er us bending Within old starry-gated Poesy,

To meet a soul set to no worldly tune,

Like thine, sweet friend! Ah! dearer this to me
Than are the dewy trees, the sun, the moon,

Or noble music with a golden ending.

A few examples must suffice to represent those English poets who have so recently stopped sing

ing, and one must be awarded to a woman who exemplified so much that was tender, womanly, and humane, Mrs. Mulock-Craik. In many of her poems the thought outruns, and is superior to, the art in the versification, yet the following is evidence enough of her capacity for smooth lines:

GUNS OF PEACE.

Sunday Night, March 30, 1856.

GHOSTS of dead soldiers in the battle slain,
Ghosts of dead heroes dying nobler far
In the long patience of inglorious war,
Of famine, cold, heat, pestilence, and pain,-
All ye whose loss makes up our vigorous gain,

This quiet night, as sounds the cannon's tongue, Do ye look down the trembling stars among, Viewing our peace and war with like disdain?

Or, wiser grown since reaching those new spheres,

bones

Smile those poor ye on ye sow'd as seed For this our harvest, nor regret the deed? Yet lift one cry with us to heavenly ears,

"Strike with Thy bolt the next red flag unfurl'd, And make all wars to cease throughout the world."

This example of the late Matthew Arnold has so much of his gospel of aspiration and hope, amid gloom, that it need hardly be accredited to him. Yet his style of versifying was more like Emerson's, striking "with hammer or with mace," and the sonnet form was perhaps no better suited to him than to the Concord poet. In this sonnet one might fancy the stanza as a gay Italian courtier struggling to bear a heavy coat of mail : —

IMMORTALITY.

FOIL'D by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say,
The world shall be thrust down, and we upborne !
And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn

The world's poor routed leavings? or will they,
Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day,
Support the fervors of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the

energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun!

And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing,

only he,

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) is highly esteemed in England as a sonneteer. By nature and training he became possessed of great sympathy with the form and used it freely. The " Dark Glass" is one of his strongest, and in it as in many of his poems he paints love and life against a sombre background. While his sonnets are artistic, they do not linger in memory like more spontaneous utterances by Wordsworth, Milton, Keats, Mrs. Browning, etc. But it is doubtless unfair to compare him with such great poets. He was more painter than philosopher or singer, yet he felt keenly, and his lines often throb with stress and pain. He put pretty and graceful work in this

sonnet:

TRUE WOMAN.

To be a sweetness more desired than Spring;

A bodily beauty more acceptable

Than the wild rose-tree's arch that crowns the fell;

To be an essence more environing

Than wine's drained juice; a music ravishing

More than the passionate pulse of Philomel,To be all this 'neath one soft bosom's swell That is the flower of life, how strange a thing!

How strange a thing to be what Man can know
But as a sacred secret! Heaven's own screen
Hides her soul's purest depth and loveliest glow;
Closely withheld, as all things most unseen,
The wave-bowered pearl, the heart-shaped seal of

green

That flecks the snowdrop underneath the snow.

Here, too, is a fluent, exquisitely subtle sonnet by Miss Rossetti :

Amor, che ne la mento mi ragiona.” - DANTE.
Amor vien nel bel viso di costei." - PETRARCH."

If there be any one can take my place

And make you happy whom I grieve to grieve,
Think not that I can grudge it, but believe
I do commend you to that nobler grace,
That readier wit than mine, that sweeter face;
Yea, since your riches make me rich, conceive
I too am crowned while bridal crowns I weave,
And thread the bridal dance with jocund pace.

For if I did not love you, it might be

That I should grudge you some one dear delight;
But since the heart is yours that was mine own,
Your pleasure is my pleasure, right my right,

Your honorable freedom makes me free,
And, you companioned, I am not alone.

66

CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI.

Robert Browning wrote the sonnet rarely, possibly because he disliked its restraints; possibly he purposed to let no lesser light of his shine by the side of the " Sonnets from the Portuguese.' The "Helen's Tower" is graceful complimentary and occasional verse, but would not be quoted save for. its personal interest. Any one, however, who studies Browning's poetry will see how inapt the sonnet form is for the willful, eccentric orbits in which his genius loved to move.

Lord Tennyson has written the sonnet occasionally, not as a habit. Yet his "Montenegro" is as glorious as Milton's on the massacre in Piedmont; while there is a great deal that is memorable in the natural and moral grandeur of "Night."

MONTENEGRO.

THEY rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
They kept their faith, their freedom on the height,
Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and night
Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,

And red with blood the crescent reels from fight
Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.

O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne

Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,
Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm

Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.