stanza, and that the couplet winds up the brief lyric with a sharp snap which is almost epigrammatic in its temper. If Shakspere, with all his instinctive feeling for technic, preferred this laxer form to the stricter and more limited arrangement of the true Italian sonnet, it was not because he was unacquainted with that, since it had been already attempted by not a few of his elder contemporaries. His choice was probably due to his belief that the three quatrains and the couplet were better suited for his own immediate purpose. As an acute critic has declared, Shakspere must have been convinced "that the classic symmetry of the Petrarchan sonnet was in English too difficult of attainment; that it cramped invention, and imposed too many sacrifices and concessions; and that the artistic end could better be achieved by the looser arrangement he adopted." Perhaps it may be suggested also that with his Elizabethan liking for points and conceits and antitheses, he felt that he wanted the final couplet with its epigrammatic suggestion. The same sharp critic noted also that Keats wrote his earlier sonnets in one of the stricter Italian forms, but in his later relapsed into the freer English arrangement which Shakspere had glorified. The most marked peculiarity of the Shaksperian fourteener is that there is likely to be a break in the sense at the end of each of the three quatrains, and that the couplet is thus sharply set off by itself. This is wholly contradictory to the theory of the more rigid Italian form, where the division occurs at the end of the second quatrain, leaving a large opportunity to the sestet for the application of the thought presented in the octave.

Having chosen his form for reasons sufficient to

himself, Shakspere revealed his keen insight into its possibilities. Commonly he developed "the subject in three stages, putting the conclusion into the final couplet." In the sixty-seventh sonnet, for example, three questions are asked, one in each quatrain; and the answer is given in the concluding pair of lines.

Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve
And lace itself with his society?

Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek

Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins ?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,

And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.

O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had
In days long since, before these last so bad.

In other sonnets, Shakspere varied his method. It has been pointed out that in the eighty-third sonnet, "the poet's apology for silence is presented as an argument in three clauses, the salient fact being put in the couplet as strongly as possible"; and that in the ninety-seventh" the second quatrain puts in an objection to the first, which is met by the third, the couplet in this case being treated as an extension of the third quatrain." Now and again, the triple division of the theme into the three quatrains is emphasized "by the repetition of the same or similar words at the beginning of each quatrain," as in the forty-ninth and the hundredth.

In spite of the weight of Shakspere's example, the large majority of English poets have preferred to

adopt a stricter form, more in accord with the Italian model, although not a few of them have clung to the final couplet. This Italian model resembles the Shaksperian form in that it is a stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines; and it differs in that it has only two quatrains and that instead of seven rimes it has at most five and often only four. The two quatrains have only two rimes between them, arranged a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a. The final six lines are allowed more liberty; indeed there is no agreement as to the number of the rimes or as to their order. Sometimes they are but two, alternating c, d, c, d, c, d; and sometimes they are three, c, d, e, c, d, e.

Milton's massive sonnet "On the Late Massacres in Piedmont" may be taken as an example of the form which has only four rimes :

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered Saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
Forget not in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

This has a sweeping unity of theme and a weighty austerity of thought. Its effect is intensified by the long open vowel-sounds ay and o which end the final lines. Its unity is so complete that it does not comply with the requirement sometimes laid down that the thought

shall be stated in the first eight lines; that there shall be a break at this point; and that then the thought shall recoil on itself in the last six lines. This condition is fulfilled in Gilder's sonnet, "The Sonnet," in which there are five rimes, two in the quatrains, a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a, and three in the tercets, c, d, e, c, d, e:

What is a sonnet? 'Tis the pearly shell

That murmurs of the far-off murmuring sea;
A precious jewel carved most curiously:

It is a little picture painted well.
What is a sonnet? "Tis the tear that fell
From a great poet's hidden ecstasy;

A two-edged sword, a star, a song — ah me!
Sometimes a heavy tolling funeral bell.

This was the flame that shook with Dante's breath;

The solemn organ whereon Milton played,

And the clear glass where Shakespere's shadow falls :

A sea this is-beware who ventureth!

For like a fiord the narrow floor is laid

Mid-ocean deep sheer to the mountain walls.

These are the only two forms of the sonnet which are admitted to be absolutely correct by the purists and precisians. In both, the quatrains have only two rimes, arranged a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a; and in one, the final six lines have also only two rimes, each repeated alternately three times, c, d, c, d, c, d, while in the other the final six lines are allotted thre rimes, each recurring twice in regular succession, c, d, e, c, d, e. But if we seek to deduce the principle from the practice of the masters of verse, we find that there this rigid rule is not supported. The immense majority of English sonnet-writers are found to cling to the accepted arrangement of the octave; but they are unwilling to be bound by any law which shall limit the sequence of the rimes in the sestet. Often

they accept one or the other of the approved arrangements; but often also they reject these, for reasons of their own, unwilling to spoil their poem for the sake of an arbitrary rule, the validity of which they do not feel bound to acknowledge. Here again the test is the ear of the hearer. It is easy for the ear to follow the strict arrangement of the rimes in the two quatrains; but it is not easy for the ear to keep up the counting in the later lines, especially since it has been trained to accept either of two arrangements. So long as the rimes in the final six lines are two or three, and so long as the final couplet is avoided, the ear is satisfied. The sonnet is an arbitrary and artificial form, appealing especially to the cultivated ear, and most of those who appreciate its merits are likely to possess more or less acquaintance with the accepted rules of its composition; therefore any failure to follow these rules is likely to disappoint these hearers and to distract their interest.

Yet it seems to be only an unjustifiable hypercriticism which would object to the couplet that occurs in the middle of the final six lines of Lang's admirable sonnet on "The Odyssey":

As one that for a weary space has lain

Lulled by the song of Circe and her wine
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Ægean isle forgets the main,
And only the low lutes of love complain,
And only shadows of wan lovers pine,
As such an one were glad to know the brine
Salt on his lips, and the large air again,
So gladly, from the songs of modern speech
Men turn, and see the stars and feel the free
Shrill wind beyond the close of heavy flowers,
And, through the music of the languid hours,