ITERATING SONNET, Written during the Talk of a War between England and the United States. War between England and the United States! Impossible! Pshaw! Stuff!-"United States!" London and Boston are United States : New York and Liverpool United States : Cotton and spinning very United States : Progress and liberty, United States : Their names, fames, books, bloods, all United States. But "bloods are up" in the United States? Well; - would'st have "low" bloods in the United States? No: high bloods—high—in both United States: So high, that, seeing their United States, They scorn to stoop from such United States Solely to please poor dis-United States. JONSIDERING that the love of Italian poetry has always been greatest in England when English genius has been in its most poetical condition, it is not a little remarkable, that the oldest known sonnet in our language dates no farther back than the reign of Henry the Eighth. It is a translation of a sonnet of Petrarca, and is the production of the noble-minded Sir Thomas Wyatt, who in several of his poems had the courage to aim the most cutting sideblows at the cruelty and effeminacy of that brutal tyrant. How are we to account for the non-appearance of a sonnet in the poems of Chaucer? — of Chaucer, who was so fond of Italian poetry, such a servant of love, such a haunter of the green corners of revery, particularly if small," of Chaucer, moreover, who was so they were especially acquainted with the writings of Petrarca's predecessor Dante, with those of his friend Boccaccio, and who, beside eulogizing the genius of Petrarca himself, is supposed to have made his personal acquaintance at Padua? Out of the four great English poets, Chaucer is the only one who has left us a sonnet of no kind whatso VOL. I. 5 ever, though he was qualified for every kind, and though of none of the four poets it would seem more naturally to have fallen in the way. The secret, I conceive, lay in one of three reasons; perhaps in all three combined: first, that the AngloNorman court which he served had so close a connection with France as to lead him, when he was not writing his narrative poetry, rather into French miscellaneous poetry than Italian; second, that the sonnets neither of Dante nor Petrarca had yet followed into England the great poem of the one, or the fame of the Latin poetry of the other; and third, that Chaucer's propensity to narration and character was so truly his master-passion in poetry, as to swallow up all the rest of his tendencies in that direction. It is observable, that, with the single exception of the beautiful and stately exaltation of his mistress's merits, beginning 66 Hide, Absalom, thy giltè tresses clear,” (which indeed is like a strain of music coming before a queen,) Chaucer's lyrical productions are few and trifling. The second of these reasons, however, I take to have been the chief. Had Chaucer been familiar with the sonnets of men whom he so admired, the very lovingness of his nature would hardly have failed to make him echo their tones. Wyatt, who came long after these poets, was born in the same year with Casa, whom we have seen purposely roughening the Sonnet, because it had grown too sweet with time. England's first sonnet, in Wyatt's hands, is as rough as if poetry itself had just been born in the woods, among the ruggedest of the sylvan gods. It is not repeated in this book. I extract one other, which does a little more justice to the writer. But I mention the former in order to observe, that, in common with almost every one of Sir Thomas's sonnets, it abides by the forms of the Legitimate Sonnet; and I may be allowed to add, in reverence for this excellent person, that although he continued for the most part to be a rugged poet, and was at all times rather a good and great man than a master of verse, he showed that he could translate smoothly as well as nobly from another Italian poet, Alamanni, one of whose satires he condensed into an invective of so much force and vehemence against the court of Henry the Eighth, as must have struck even the hard heart of that ruffian with awe and astonishment. The first English sonnets that possessed anything like Italian music were the production of Wyatt's young friend, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who is justly ranked among the most elegant and promising of our early poets. He perished at thirty years of age, on a ridiculous pretence, by order of the tyrant whom they both hated; nor is it improbable, that one of the sonnets extracted into this book, the one commencing "The Assyrian King, in peace, with foul desire" — was the real cause of the murder. As Wyatt was the first introducer of the Sonnet into his native language, so he was the first, though but in one instance, to set the example of a departure from its laws, and thus introduce the Illegitimate Sonnet. All the rest of his thirty-two sonnets are of the authorized construction. Those of Surrey, which are scarcely half as many in number, are either wholly illegitimate, and setters of the pattern generally followed in England till lately, or they run upon one rhyme, till they close with a couplet in another, a form not without precedent in Italian poetry, though very rare. None are destitute of merit; and there are three in the present volumes successively characterized by truth, tenderness, and strength. It is a curious circumstance, in the history of sonnets, and might be thought to tell in their disfavor, if the cases were not exceptional, manners of times to be considered, and the vast majority of sonnets of a different description, that so many of them turn upon illegal attachments. Dante who makes a saint of Beatrice, and ultimately of himself too, and who marries her, as it were, in Heaven, never breathes a syllable of her husband. Nobody would suppose that there had been such a casualty in the lady's life. Beatrice, for all that appears to the contrary, is always the unmarried Beatrice that Dante first became acquainted with, - the same Beatrice Portinari. The married woman, Beatrice de' Bardi, is a gentlewoman never heard of. It is the same with Petrarca. Nobody would dream, from his three hundred sonnets, that there was a gentleman of the name of De Sade, who had a right to ask him "what he meant." The poet ignores the husband during the whole of the lady's life on earth; and when the lady dies, she equally ignores the husband, and invites the poet to come and live with her in Paradise. This looks, in both instances, as if there must have been some remarkable reasons for the conduct, with which readers are unacquainted. Casa, the next famous sonnet-writer to Petrarca, is understood to have addressed his love-verses to a married lady of the name of Quirino. He was an ecclesiastic; who is a person in Roman Catholic coun |