Sonnets seem to require a peculiar talent. Almost all our best men have written them, and almost all badly, while the small newspaper and periodical craft strand on them daily. Only our deepest and most refined thinkers have written really good ones, and to succeed in them at all, is to join a very limited coterie, where Shakespeare and Milton have but few compeers. When, then, we say that De Vere is the author of some of the best we have in our literature, we justify high expectation.
He is one of the most voluminous of sonnet writers. There are in the books between one hundred and fifty and two hundred. It seems to be his favorite outlet for those briefer, choicer reflections that lose their charm by being amplified for the vulgar comprehension,
". . . . As orient essences, diffuse
On all the liberal airs of low Cashmere,
Waft their rich faintness far to stolid hinds,
To whom the rose is but a thorny weed;"
but which, after all, are the trifles that make up the inner life of a soul, and for whose waste, as our author himself says,
"Nature, trifled with, not loved,
Will be at last avenged."
It may well be imagined that this is a path peculiarly adapted to our author's contemplative yet versatile mind. He is singularly fitted for this style of composition, which does not demand the least particle of that kind of spirit and impulsive animation in which he is wanting; and accordingly he has written a number of sonnets which will, we think, compare with the very best for eloquence and just thought. Walter Savage Landor—non sordidus auctor—deliberately pronounced the one on Sunrise the finest in the language.
Two others, by which he is probably best known to American readers, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, one written March, 1860, the other, June 12, 1861, addressed to Charles Eliot Norton, the editor of the North American Review. Both relate to the national struggle, and indicate a somewhat lively interest in our affairs, but otherwise are not remarkable. Much better than these we find the following. It is a good sample besides of the author's general style:
"Silence and sleep, and midnight's softest gloom,
Consoling friends of fast declining years,
Benign assuagers of unfruitful tears,
Soft-footed heralds of the wished-four tomb!
Go to your master, Death—the monarch whom
Ye serve, whose majesty your grace endears.
And in the awful hollows of his ears
Murmur, oh! ever murmur: 'Come, O come!'
Virginal rights have I observed full long,
And all observance worthy of a bride.
Then wherefore, Death, dost thou to me is wrong,
So long estranged to linger from my side?
Am I not thine? Oh! breathe upon my eyes
A gentle answer, Death, from thine elysian skies!"
It is no easy thing to be publicly and yet gracefully sad. Do not we mentally associate an idea of weakness or effeminacy with melancholic writings? Yet here is—we feel it at once—the true sadness we all respect: the unaffected weariness which does not cry out its grief, but sighs because it suffers and is strong.