Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace

BY ANNA SEWARD.
PRICE SIX SHILLINGS AND SIXPENCE.
Entered at Stationers hall.
BY ANNA SEWARD.
“ Come, bright Imagination come, relume Thy orient lamp. ”
See Sonnet 1
LONDON :
PRINTED FOR G. SAEL, NO. 192, STRAND; AND SOLD BY MR. SWINNEY, BIRMINGHAM, AND MR. MORGAN, LICHFIELD.
1799.
Whatever other excellence may be wanting in the ensuing Poems, they are, with only nine exceptions out of the hundred, strictly Sonnets. Those nine vary only from the rules of the legitimate Sonnet in that they rhime three , instead of four times in the first part. The pause is in them , as in the rest , variously placed through the course of the verses; and thus they bear no more resemblance than their associates, to those minute Elegies of twelve alternate rhimes, closing with a couplet, which assume the name of Sonnet, without any other resemblance to that order of Verse, except their limitation to fourteen lines. I never found the quadruple rhimes injurious to the general expression of the sense, but in the excepted instances. When it is considered how few they are in so large a number, I flatter myself the idea will vanish that our language is not capable of doing justice to the regular Sonnet.
From the Supplement to the Gentleman's Magazine for 1786, I shall insert Mr. White's definition of the nature and perfection of this species of Verse, because I think it explains them with justness and precision.
“Little Elegies, consisting of four stanzas and a couplet, are no more Sonnets than they are Epic Poems. The Sonnet is of a particular and arbitrary construction; it partakes of the nature of Blank Verse, by the lines running into each other at proper intervals. Each line of the first eight, rhimes four times, and the order in which those rhimes should fall is decisive. For the ensuing six there is more licence; they may, or may not, at pleasure, close with a couplet.