Then Professor Van Dyke appends this significant comment:
There was no great novelty in this arrangement. It was frankly adopted from Italian Renascence painting and had been used for high altar-pieces by all the later painters—Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, Titian, Palma. They had worked out the best way of filling that up-right-and-arched space, and La Farge followed the tradition because he recognized its sufficiency.
In other words, the art of painting had so far advanced that La Farge was supplied with the pattern best suited to his purpose; and this pattern once accepted, he was at liberty to paint the picture as he saw it, without wasting time in quest of another construction. The picture he put within that frame was his and his only, even if the pattern of it had been devised centuries before he was born. In thus utilizing a framework invented by his predecessors he was not cramped and confined; rather was he set free. So it is that to Milton and to Wordsworth the rigidity of the sonnet was not a hindrance but a help—especially to Wordsworth since it curbed his tendency to diffuseness. Wordsworth himself declared his delight in the restrictions of the sonnet:
In truth the prison into which we doom
Ourselves no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be),
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace here, as I have found.