“Out of eighteen English Sonnets, written by Milton, four are bad. The rest, though they are not free from certain hardnesses, have a pathos and greatness in their simplicity, sufficient to endear the legitimate Sonnet to every Reader of just taste. They possess a characteristic grace, which can never belong to three elegiac stanzas, closing with a couplet.”
I have pleasure in quoting the preceding Dissertation on the Sonnet, conscious that there is no order of Verse, upon which so much erroneous opinion has gone forth, and of whose beauties the merely common Reader is so insensible. But when the Author of this just Treatise says of the assertion, that the legitimate Sonnet suits not our language, “its truth cannot be demonstrated,” he should perhaps rather have observed, that its fallacy is proved by the great number of beautiful legitimate Sonnets, which adorn our National Poetry, not only by Milton, but by many of our modern Poets.
Of the four of Milton's, justly disapproved by Mr. White, there is one evidently a burlesque, written in sport. It begins,
“A book was writ of late, call'd Tetrachordon.”
Doctor Johnson has the disingenuousness, in his Folio Dictionary, under the word Sonnet, to cite that Sonnet at full length, as a specimen of Milton's style in this kind of Poetry. Johnson disliked Sonnets, and he equally disliked Blank Verse, and Odes. It is in vain to combat the prejudice of splenetic aversion. The Sonnet is an highly valuable species of Verse; the best vehicle for a single detached thought, an elevated, or a tender sentiment, and for a succinct description. The compositions of that order now before the Reader, ensued from time to time, as various circumstances impressed the heart, or the imagination of their Author, and as the aweful, or lovely scenes of Nature, arrested, or allured her eye.
TO MISS SEWARD,
ON READING HER CENTENARY OF SONNETS.
Dear are the forceful energies of Song,
For they do swell the spring-tide of the heart
With rosier currents, and impel along
The life-blood freely:—O! they can impart
Raptures ne'er dreamt of by the sordid throng
Who barter human feeling at the mart
Of pamper'd selfishness, and thus do wrong
Imperial Nature of her prime desert.—
Seward! thy strains, beyond the critic-praise
Which may to arduous skill its meed assign,
Can the pure sympathies of spirit raise
To bright Imagination's throne divine;
And proudly triumph, with a generous strife,
O'er all the “flat realities of life.”
High Street, Marybone,
Feb. 1, 1799.