notice nothing, though there is an eery wail in the wind outside and something ominous in the way in which

"The shadows cast on the arras'd wall

'Mid the pictured kings stood sudden and tall,
Like spectres sprung from the ground."

As the King and Queen lie together at rest they are suddenly startled by a wild shrill voice crying strange words under their chamber window, and they recognise the voice as the same that once prophesied to them by the Scottish sea. And now the King is told it is too late, or almost too late, for the mystic shroud she has watched year by year extending from feet to arms covers his eyes and mouth, the prophetic wail and appeal ending in the following magnificent stanza, lines which no living or recent poet has surpassed in weird imaginativeness and supernatural effect:

"For every man on God's ground, O King,
His death grows up from his birth

In a shadow-plant perpetually;

And thine towers high, a black yew-tree,
O'er the Charterhouse of Perth!"

But the repeated warning has come too late, and Sir Robert Graeme and his fellow-traitors have gained access to the royal apartments. At the appeal of the Queen and Catherine Douglas the unarmed and betrayed King springs down into a vault beneath, foul and confined but the only possible refuge, and while the Queen sees to the removing the traces of the torn plank which had been displaced, Catherine Douglas, as she herself is narrating, springs to the door as she hears the tread of armed men approaching and in

despair thrusts her arm through the stanchions that had once held the iron bar. One crash, however, and the arm is shattered and entrance gained. Then follows the horrible tragedy of the King's murder, after a brief space wherein the women thought to have deceived the traitors, which indeed they might have succeeded in doing had it not been for the traitorchamberlain, Robert Stuart.

The narrator of the ballad goes on to tell how vengeance was at last accomplished, and The King's Tragedy concludes with the bitter thought of Queen Jane,

"That a poet true and a friend of man,

Brief as this account of the important balladsection of Rossetti's poetic work has been, it may serve to show that his fame as a poet is not based alone upon his sonnets, that indeed it comprises compositions upon which his name will probably rest when many of the sonnets have ceased to charm any save the rare cultivated ear and the poetic student.

CHAPTER VII.

THE SONNET-SONNETS FOR PICTURES-MISCELLANEOUS

SONNETS.

"Apart from all sanctions, the student of poetry knows that no form of verse is a surer touchstone of mastery than this, which is so easy to write badly, so supremely difficult to write well, so full both of hindrance and of occasion in all matters of structure and of style; neither any a more searching test of inspiration, since on the one hand it seems to provoke the affectations of ingenuity, and on the other hand it has been chosen by the greatest men of all as the medium for their most intimate, direct, and overwhelming self-disclosures."-The Westminster Review, 1871.

"Parmi les auteurs modernes de sonnets en Angleterre, M. Rossetti a droit à la première place. Pour trouver les mêmes qualités que dans ses ouvrages, il faut s'addresser aux sonnets de Shakespeare, de Milton, ou de Wordsworth. L'influence des

modèles Italiens sur l'auteur se fait fortement sentir, et l'intensité de la passion se mêle chez lui à une austérité qui vient directement du Dante. Comme magnificence de langage, la littérature Anglaise moderne n'a rien qui égale ces poèmes." Le Livre, 10 Décembre, 1881.

If it were practicable at this advanced stage to go into detail on so interesting a subject as the Sonnet, I should willingly have done so, both because of Rossetti's connection with this form of literature and because a markedly widespread interest has of late been reawakened and seems still increasing in sonnet-expression, but the exigencies of space imperatively forbid

my doing so. A few prefatory remarks, however, seem necessary.

The two quotations at the head of this chapter strike the keynote of the remaining portion of this book: that from the Westminster Review stating concisely the position the sonnet holds as a vehicle of poetic expression, and that from Le Livre the position Dante Gabriel Rossetti occupies in sonnet-literature. It is hardly necessary to call to mind that this form has been a favourite one with poets for hundreds of years, and that some of the greatest writers of our own and other lands have chosen it for personal revelation in preference to any other metrical arrangement: we at once recall how Laura's memory and Petrarca's love are embalmed in the three hundred and fifteen sonnets comprised in the In Vita and the In Morte di M. Laura; how the beautiful and unfortunate Gaspara Stampa, whom Titian and Tintoretto and others of her famous contemporaries considered the Italian Sappho, enshrined in burning words her love for the Lord of Collalto; how Shakespeare used the sonnet as a key to unlock his heart and inner life; how Mrs. Browning embodied in an imperishable series the passion and devotion of a woman's love. Yet it is strange that this form, so widely used in English literature alone and known to be worthy by the guarantee of such names as Spenser, Drummond, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hartley Coleridge, Mrs. Browning, Tennyson-Turner, Christina Rossetti, Dante Rossetti, and others of the past and present, should be so little apprehended as to its externals and its essentials, by the average reader of poetic literature, that it is doubtful if even yet a majority of such readers would at

once be able to realise or to state that the sonnet is a poem of invariably fourteen decasyllabic lines with understood artificial rhyme-arrangement-still more doubtful if such would at once apprehend the differences between the Shakespearian structure, the Miltonic, and the Petrarchan.

Yet differences so essential can be comprised within this limited compass of fourteen lines, that some authorities would go the length of denying the name of sonnet to many poems so called altogether. Before briefly specifying the points of divergence between the leading sonnet-structures I may state that there seems to me but one cardinal law affecting the sonnet, and that is that every sonnet must be the intensified expression of one emotion or one thought, and that whenever more than one thought or one emotion is introduced, or whenever the expression is not intensified to concise, direct, and immediate relation with the motif it ceases to be a sonnet. "The sonnet is a moment's monument;" if it is not " a moment's monument it might as well be styled "Lines," or "Quatrains," or a "Stanza." I confess that if a sonnet satisfies me on this point its rhymearrangement matters to me little, though I fully admit that the sensitive ear recognises at once the value of an octave with only two rhymes and a sestet with three as a maximum. This latter musical and instinctively agreeable rhyme-arrangement once accepted, it seems to me there is but one material point of divergence worth discussing-namely, whether, as a rule, the dictum of Keats is the better

"The sonnet, swelling loudly Up to its climax, and then dying proudly;