Dear Sir,
Having at last taken an opportunity to read your pleasant volume, it has had an effect upon me much to be regretted and you will find the consequences in verse. I had not written a serious sonnet since boyhood, when I used to imitate Milton and Wordsworth with surprising results: and since I have fallen again by your procuring (a procuration) you must suffer along with me.
May I say that my favourite sonnet in the whole range of your book is Tennyson Turner’s “The Buoy-Bell?” Possibly there is a touch of association in this preference; but I think not. No human work is perfect; but that is near enough.
Yours truly,
Robert Louis Stevenson.
The form of my so-called sonnets will cause you as much agony as it causes me little. I am base enough to think the main point of a sonnet is the disjunction of thought coinciding with the end of the octave: and when a lesser disjunction makes the quatrains and sestets I call it an ideal sonnet; even if it were rhymed anyhow. But the cross rhyme, tears—fear, in the second is, even in my base eyes, a vile flaw.
(Two sonnets were enclosed in the letter.)
THE ARABESQUE
(Complaint of an artist)
I made a fresco on the coronal,
Amid the sounding silence and the void