Washington standard. [volume] (Olympia, Wash. Territory) 1860-1921, 1878-12-28
The SOnneteers Of the Seventeenth
Century,

OF the sonneteers of the seventeenth
century there are only two of any real
importance Of which we need speak. and
they are Drummond, of Hawthorne.
den. and Milton. To do justice to the
former, we must place him in the first
class OF sonnet-writers, though we do
not remember any one particular son.
net Of his that can rank with the best
Of Wordsworth, Keats, Milton. or Shak.
speare, or with Shelley's weird and i'm.
pressive "Ozymandias." His one on
''Sleep,"
"Sweet father of all rest,
Prince whose approach peace to ali mortals
brings"
is, perhaps, the most perfect. and we
prefer it, on the whole. to the sonnet
on the same subject by Samuel Daniel.
which has been much praised in re.
cent article in the Qaarterly Rerie,c for
"mellifluous tenderness, whatever that
may mean, and which rhymes "born"
to "return," and "desires'' to Glars"
so that the rhymes cannot like the ten
derness, be described as "sweetly flow.
ing" Drummond had reached man.
hood when Milton was only child !;
and it is possible that, in some small
degree, the sonnets OF the former we're
studied as models by the latter; but
surely it WIS those of Petrarch and the
Italian poets that Milton chiefly imi.
tated-if. indeed, he can be said to have
initiated any. In one important re-
spect his sonnets differ from most, if
not from all, of Drummond's, and that
is that, like the italian sonnets, they
do not end with final couplet. Indeed,
with the exception of Sir Phillip Sid
ney, Milton was the first English SON.
neteer that did not adopt this mode of
bringing the poem to close, and even
Sir Phillip Sidney adopts it in many of
his sonnets. The chief point in respect
of which Milton turns his back upon
the early Italian masters is that he con-
tinually runs the major part of the SON.
! net into the minor without making any
stop or pause at the end of the eighth
line. His "Avenge, O Lord, Thy
slaughtered saints" is an example Of
this; and grand MS are its trumpet
calls, as Wordsworth would have termed
them, it is guilty of another very seri-
Gus fault, and one that in minor poet
would be considered objectionable.
We refer to the fact that there is no
variety in the vowel.sound of the
rhymes in the octave, the words being
"bones, "cold," "old," "stones," &c.
But We are not going to follow the ex-
ample of DR.. johnson, and find fault
with or depreciate the sonnets of the
great Puritan poet. DR.. johnson, it
will be remembered, stated "that three
of them were not bad:" and he told
Hannah Moore that "Milton was q
genius that could hew o colossus out of
q rock, but could not carve heads on
cherry-stones." This, we may remark
is not the only subject on which the
illustrious Photographer appears to
have delivered very unsound judg-
ment. Very different is the manner in
which Wordsworth, the English Pc
trarch, speaks of Millions sonnets as be-
ing "soul-animating strains-alas two
feww During the hundred years fol.
lowing after the death of Milton the
sonnet was but little written, yet we
cannot leave unmentioned the one by
Gray, ION the Death of Richard West"
nor those by Thomas Wharton, especi-
ally that written on blank leaf of
Dugdale's Monisicon." containing the
following striking line, which Mr..
Whistler would probably describe as a
symphony in p:
"Of painful pendantry the porting child"
-7insiey's Magazine.