That from their fluid pillow never rise,
Float on the lazy current of a dream.
Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to him
the predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.
But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones:
Love but the formless and eternal Whole
From whose effulgence one unheeded ray
Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay
Into the flickering colors of thy soul.
This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.