20 DECEMBER 1873, Page 15

BOOKS.

MR. DENNIS'S SELECTION OF ENGLISH SONNETS.* The. DENNIS might well have added to this careful and critical selection of English Sonnets something on the special dangers which the sonnet has to avoid, and the special merits which it should display. He has said very tersely in his too short pre- face, that "condensation of thought, exactitude of language, and unity of design are demanded of the sonnet-writer, and through his fourteen lines,.and knitting them together, must run the golden thread of poetry." And we quite agree that the sonnet is the proper form for a feeling dominated by thought rather than for either pure picture or pure emotion,—that the law of its rhyme especially fits it for a sort of spiral upward flight, one which both mounts and returns at intervals to the same point of view, till in the last rhymed couplet,—if it follow the Shake- spearian sonnet's law, which, in this respect at least, has always seemed to us to show a higher feeling for the expressive power of this kind of verse than the more regular sonnet,—the last word of the condensed thought and feeling should be uttered with an intensity that exceeds all that has gone before. Nothing can give a more perfect conception of the work the sonnet is best fitted for, than one, perhaps the most beautiful in the language, which Mr. Dennis has, of course, given us here, and which, strangely enough, was written by a foreigner :—

" Nunn arm DEATH.

"Mysterious Night ! when our first parent knew Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,

Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue ?

Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus with the host of heaven eftme,

And lc) Creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed Within thy beams, 0 Sun! or who could find, Whilst fly and leaf and insect stood revealed, That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind !

Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?

If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life ? "

The exquisite art of that sonnet of Mr. Blanco White's seems to us to exhibit, as in a perfect type, the true rationale of the sonnet. It is not abstract, for it is penetrated throughout with the most vivid sense of vision ; it is not merely or chiefly pictorial, for its whole life and meaning are intellectual, an appeal to the highest and subtlest kind of analogy ; it is not didactic, for it throbs with the keenest of human feelings, the profound mystery of Death mingled with the instinct of immortality ; it is not stagnant—the worst danger of the sonnet—but full of motion, every line ad- vancing you towards the conclusion ; it is not broken into bits and pieced together, which some very fine sonnets, in spite of the minute scale of the organic structure of the sonnet, are, for there is but one thought in it, and for that you are prepared by the first two lines, while it shines out full and complete upon you in the last ; and it does contrive, as but few sonnets do, to combine the vivid flash of a surprise with the stately move- ment of an intellectual train of thought. We doubt if any of Wordsworth's finest sonnets, any of Hartley Goleridge'e, any of Shakespeare's,—and surely their sonnets are the finest in Mr. Dennis's selection, —can equal it in purity, intensity, and perfect adaptation of the form to the thought or feel- ing embodied. There in, perhaps, one minute formal flaw in it,—the redundancy in the words "fig and leaf and insect," where one looks for a rise in tho microscopic detail of what the light reveals, such as "mote, and leaf, and insect," but that is a flaw which probably escaped the author's eye simply because it was so minute. If a selection of poetry could be conceived in which a single specimen only, of the most perfectly typical kind, of all sorts of English poems, were given, surely the proper speci- men to take for the Sonnet of such a selection would be Mr. 131anco White's. Very few others even of the finest here given Are not defective in some way in which this is perfect. The very fine 'sonnet in which Wordsworth, for instance, expresses his dislike and disdain of the puerility of "personal talk," and in his nervous,

rugged strain declares, -

",Better than such discourse doth silence long. Long, barren silence squaro with my desire," begins weakly and prosaically, only to rise into poetry as is gets to the core of his hardy nature. Again, Shakespeare's magnificent sonnet on "True love unchangeable "---" Let me not to the mar- * English sonnets. A Selection. Fated by John Dennis, London: floury O. Kinganit Co. nags of true minds admit impediments," ends feebly with a mere strong form of personal asseveration, declaring that

"If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved,"

—which lets you down easily after the eloquent flight of the pre- vious lines. The great danger of Wordsworth's sonnet was didacticism, and in some of his sonnets he fell into it almost without a struggle, so that the sonnet reads as flat as a dominie's preach- ment. The last three, for instance, which Mr. Dennis gives us of Wordsworth's four sonnets on "Personal Talk" seem to us full of faults as sonnets. They are incomplete (which the first of the four is not), and require to be read as a series in order to be understood, a great fault of form, which indeed breaks completely that law of concentration truly described by Mr. Dennis as the great law of the sonnet. They are prosy, and not penetrated like the first of them with a vein of deep feeling, but rather mere expressions of the ragged intellectual obstinacy of Wordsworth's mind ; they lapse into fragmentary, capricious remarks, as when the poet says that he will name two books he is particularly fond of,—and refers to the Thery Queen and Othello,— wherein he finds a kind of personal talk that is not trivial ; and they are didactic, and seek by main strength of assertion to impose on his readers the lesson which his own genius has taught him. It seems to us strange, while giving us these,—in order, we suppose, to make the aeries on this subject complete, whereas a thought which needs to be expanded in a series (this, by the way, did not need it, for it was spoiled by that expansion), is not fit for a sonnet at all,—Mr. Dennis did not give us two which are among the finest of all Words- worth's sonnets, the exquisitely Wordsworthian one to Toussaint l'Ouverture, and the one to a lady "in her seventieth year." Both of these have the note of perfection which is wanting to all the three last sonnets on "Personal Talk," and to too many others of Wordsworth's, though never to his finest sonnets,—that they rise to their strongest and highest tone in the final lines. Surely Wordsworth never surpassed the close of this :— "Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough Within thy hearing, or thy head be now Pillowed in some deep dungeon's oarless den ; 0 miserable chieftain! where and when Wilt thou find patience ? Yet die not; do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow; Though fallen thyself, never to rise again, Live and take comfort. Thou hast left behind Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and skies, There's not a breathing of the common wind That will forget thee; thou haat great allies ; Thy friends are exultations, agonies, And love, and man's unconquerable mind !"

And where did Wordsworth's genius ever pour more liquid music into a sonnet than into the second one to which we have referred, on the beauty of age ?—

" Stich age, how beautiful! 0 lady bright

Whose mortal lineaments seem all refined, By favouring nature and a saintly Mind To something purer and more exquisite Than flesh and blood ; whene'er thou meet'st my sight, When I behold thy blanched, unwithered cheek, Thy temples fringed with locks of gleaming white, And head that droops because the soul is meek, Thee with the welcome snowdrop I compare, That child of winter, prompting thoughts that climb From desolation toward the genial prime,

Or with the Moon, conquering earth's misty air,

And filling more and more with crystal light As pensive Evening deepens into Night."

No two men will ever perfectly agree on the details of a great poet's poetry ; but if, as we suspect, Mr. Dennis gave us the whole aeries on "Personal Talk" only from a superstitious feeling that he could not give one without the others, we think he would have done better to break off the three links which dangle so awkwardly from that first into which all Wordsworth's charac- teristic feeling was poured, and give us these in their place. Indeed we would gladly have exchanged for these the two on Izaak Walton.

Nothing shows Mr. Dennis's purity of taste better than his exquisite selection from John Clare's, William Caldwell Roscoe's, David Gray's, and Hartley Coleridge'e Sonnets, all of them most beautiful, and many of them but little known. Mrs. Browning is, of course, better known than most of them, and of the rich beauty of her sonnets, so called, "from the Portuguese" no one can•doubt ; all of them are threaded by that mounting chord of feeling which seems to get its clearest utterance in the last line, and all of them are, what too many sonnets certainly are not, musical. But we feel inclined to reproach Mr. Dennis for not being fastidious enough as to Mrs. Browning's affectations of language, and admitting some that for that great fault we would have excluded, while one, perhaps the simplest and most pathetic of all, the one beginning,— " If I leave all for thee, wilt thou exchange

And be all to me? "

we are sorry to miss. The structure of the sonnet is so simple and so well adapted for intellectual subjects, that it seems more than most other forms of poetry to have a repulsion for any attempt, by twist and strain and effort of manner, to express more than the words themselves will hold, and this is the fault which often seems to us to deform the beauty of Mrs. Browning's eloquent and tender sonnets. Here, for instance, is one so spoiled by blots of this kind that we heartily wish it away, in spite of the depth of feeling embodied and the beauty of the opening :— " FUTURITY.

"And, 0 beloved voices! upon which

Ours passionately call because erelong

Ye brake off in the middle of that song 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 swept from their beauty,—glorified New Afemnons singing in the great God-light."

The lines we have italicised are to our minds odiously phrased, frightful sentimentalities of language forced into a pure vein of feeling in order to make it more emphatic.

Why has Mr. Dennis given 118 no single sonnet of Hood's ? Two at least of his, those beginning "It is not death that some- time in a sigh," and "There is a silence where hath been no sound," will compare well with the very noblest in this volume. Surely this was an oversight. Again, we doubt if Mr. Dennis has been quite as fastidious as we would :lave wished in dealing with the older poets, though from some of them,—Drummond, for instance, —his selection is extremely fine. He has indeed, as a critic of so. much taste would be sure to do, given LIB the very flower of Shakespeare's sonnets. But why include that very clumsy sonnet. of Stillingfleet's, with its somewhat grotesque opening,— " When I beheld thee, blameless Williamson," and with its very involved and, on the whole, unpoetic metaphor? and why include that one of Milton's beginning "Lawrence, of virtuous father, virtuous son," which is trivial, and not worthy of the great poet's genius ; and why give two, at least, of Sir Philip. Sidney's, which appear to us extremely poor ? Cowper, again, did not excel in the sonnet ; it had not the elasticity which was essential to his genius, and we could well have spared the terribly tame sonnets to Mrs. Univin and John Johnson. Nor do we admire Lord Thurlow'a didactic sonnet on the heron, which leads the mind away from a fresh nature-picture to a very forced moral, and one that seems to us very jejune. Perhaps this and other sonnets are to be included in those mentioned by Mr. Dennis in his preface as some "whose intrinsic value is comparatively slight, although, from association or from other causes, they possess a literary interest ;" but we doubt the policy of including any such in so small a volume, meant to embalm for us the very flower and essence of this kind of poetry. We would have included no sonnet, however great the name of its author, or however in-

teresting its associations, which was not a fine poem, a very fine poem of its kind.

But we have criticised enough. No one will doubt that, with perhaps a few great exceptions, such as we have referred to, Mr. Dennis has here given us an exquisite selection, a. selection which every lover of poetry will consult again and again with delight. The notes are very useful, and must have involved often considerable labour. We would suggest, in any second edition, which this volume is, we hope, sure to reach, and to reach soon, an index of authors, as well as of first lines.. It is true, the arrangement is nominally chronological. But it is often very difficult to say which of several authors would come first, partly because we do not minutely recollect priority as amongst contemporaries, partly because, of two poets, one is often born the first, but dies the last, living into an age far more modern than that of his junior ; and, in point of fact, Mr. Dennis himself has sometimes put first the poet who was first born, and sometimes the poet who was the first to die, so that it is not always easy to find any one poet in a moment. The volume is one for which. English literature owes Mr. Dennis the heartiest thanks.