[363].
The word screen (line 4) means, I think, "Hide and shelter those smiles away that in their beauty seem to burn in the air": for all beauty resembles radiance in its influence on the mind. And this recalls to memory Southwell's poem, The Burning Babe, No. 256.
[364]. "A Sonnet of the Moon."
The closer one looks at and examines a fine sonnet—its way of rhyming, its rise, poise, flight and fall, the ease and exactitude with which what is said in it fills its mould or form—the more, I was going to say, one should hesitate before attempting to write another. This particular sonnet (like No. 361), is of the English or Shakespearean kind, and is so lovely a thing that only a close attention would notice the carelessness of its rhymes. No. 342 is an example of the form which our sixteenth century poets borrowed from Italy. Comparison of them shows that, as with the old Chinese ginger jars, so in poetry: not only is the syrup delightful, but even the pot may be interesting.
Coleridge wrote few sonnets, and this is his explanation of the length one must be: "It is confined to fourteen lines, because as some particular number is necessary, and that particular number must be a small one, it may as well be fourteen as any other number. When no reason can be adduced against a thing, Custom is a sufficient reason for it."
When I read this last remark for the first time it was as if my mind had been startled into attention as one's body is when it collides with a stranger in the street. There is a wide wisdom in it. How many natural, human and delightful things there are in this world indeed for which Custom is a sufficient reason: Children, for instance, daisies in the grass, skylarks in the clouds, dreams in sleep, rhymes, gay clothes, friendship, laughter.
"The Pale Queen."
There is the apparition of a lovely face in the Moon—proud and mute—to be discovered by careful eyes usually on the extreme right of the disc, her own eyes gazing towards the left.
[368]. "It was in and about the Martinmas time."
This old Scottish song was a favourite of Oliver Goldsmith's in his childhood. "The music of the finest singer," he said, "is dissonance to what I felt when our old dairy-maid sung me into tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night, or The Cruelty of Barbara Allen.