I feel my pulses beat, my forehead burn
When I remember thou hast given for me
All that thou hadst, thy life, thy very name,
And I can give thee nothing in return.

Among those of more recent writers the sonnets of Edith Thomas, Emma Lazarus, and Lloyd Mifflin are especially noteworthy. There are many other sporadic sonnets of admirable quality scattered here and there in our literature. The few of Parsons make us regret that the author did not more frequently essay this difficult form. The modern tendency to avoid sonorousness and volume of sound, to repress the force of the accent beat in any one line, to reduce poetic diction to the simplicity of prose, and to keep emotional expression within decorous, conventional bounds seems to prevent the production of sonnets of the highest class. The sonnet is well adapted to the presentation of two related thoughts, whether the relation be that of contrast or of parallelism, but it is so short that the body of thought must be very condensed and striking, lucidly presented and yet of far-reaching suggestiveness. The technical difficulties of the form are also very great, which, indeed, makes the perfect ones the more satisfying. Sonnet beauty depends on symmetry and asymmetry both, for the parts are unequal in length and different in form and melody. In this it resembles things of organic beauty as opposed to things of geometric

beauty. It involves the principle of balanced yet dissimilar masses, of formality and freedom, like a tree which has developed under the rigorous law of its growth and yet is shaped by the chance of wind and sunshine into something individual. The sonnet form could not have endured the test of time for so many years did it not embody some of the underlying principles of beauty.

The following sonnets on the sonnet will show how it has been regarded by three poets:

Scorn not the sonnet; Critic, you have frowned
Mindless of its just honors; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoëns soothed an exile's grief;
The sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains alas too few.

WORDSWORTH.

A sonnet is a moment's monument,
Memorial from the soul's eternity

To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent

Of its own arduous fullness reverent;

Carve it in ivory or in ebony

As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals

The soul its converse to what Power 'tis due, Whether for tribute to the august appeals

Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,

It serve; or mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to death.

Yon silvery billows breaking on the beach
Fall back in foam beneath the star-shine clear,
The while my rhymes are murmuring in your ear
A restless lore like that the billows teach;
For on these sonnet-waves my soul would reach
From its own depths, and rest within you, dear,
As, through the billowy voices yearning here,
Great nature strives to find a human speech.

A sonnet is a wave of melody;

From heaving waters of the impassioned soul
A billow of tidal music one and whole
Flows in the "octave," then returning free
Its ebbing surges in the "sestet " roll
Back to the deeps of life's tumultuous sea.

THEODORE WATTS.

BOOKS ON THE SONNET: Book of the Sonnet, 2 vols., Leigh Hunt; Sonnets of the Century, with critical introduction by William Sharp; Three Hundred English Sonnets, D. M. Mann; A Treasury of Sonnets, D. M. Mann.

FORMS OF ENG. POETRY -IO

CHAPTER IV

THE ODE

THE ballad is a popular form, a medieval heritage; the sonnet belongs to the poetry of culture, is of Italian origin, and a part of the fruit of the English renaissance of the sixteenth century. The English ode though having also an Italian root is primarily a revival of a classic form of verse. It dates from the seventeenth century though the Italian canzone had been used as a model by Spenser at a slightly earlier period. The word "ode," derived from the Greek word meaning a song, has something of the indefinite range of meaning that attaches to the word "ballad." covers: first, lyrics of some dignity and length intended to be sung by a trained chorus, like Dryden's Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, and Alexander's Feast, or Sidney Lanier's ode on the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia; second, poems read at some important occasion but not intended to be sung, like Lowell's Commemoration Ode; third, poems intended to be read in private, like Wordsworth's Ode to Duty, or Keats's Ode to a Nightingale. We also speak habitually of the

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Odes of Horace, though his Carmina, with the exception of the Carmen Seculare, were not written for a chorus of singers and are largely of the nature of society verse. In the same way we speak of the Odes of Anacreon, though these are clearly songs and intended for the single voice. Taking these two last usages as exceptional and traditional, there are nevertheless some common characteristics in the three first mentioned classes. Mr. Gosse says (English Odes, Introduction, p. 12), "We take as an ode any strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." The definition, though wordy and not insisting on any one mark as absolutely requisite, is perhaps as good a one as can be found, though it would seem to apply to good odes rather than to the species in general. It leaves the question open whether some of the requirements cannot be wanting and yet the production fall within the category, and it does not notice the specialized uses of the word, as in the "Horatian ode.” But it will aid us in forming, from the examination of specimens, a conception of the content of the term and of the difference between its generalized and its specialized uses.

The ode, then, deals with a "theme." It is not narration, but poetical exposition, and if some narrative is found in it, the story serves as the basis for exhortation or reflection; it is not brought in for