INTRODUCTION TO THE MISCELLANEOUS SONNETS. THE following Sonnets can pretend to pretend to little more than to be commemorations of particular feelings, or particular scenes, with which, from time to time, the Author was more than usually impressed. The first eight Sonnets have appeared in former editions of the poems of the Author :— -all the subsequent ones are now printed for the first time. In these, comprized in the latter collection, the Author has, with a very few exceptions, rigorously adhered to the repetition of rhymes found in all the sonnets of Italian Authors, from whom those of Great Britain have borrowed this species of composition. In his opinion, the Sonnet, from its brevity, is a poem so liable to be overlooked, if not despised, that it is well, by connecting with its structure some artificial complexity, to give to it, independently of whatever poetic merit it may possess, the additional one of difficulty surmounted. A poem in three elegiac stanzas, with a couplet tacked to the end of them, like those to which Mrs. Charlotte Smith allows by courtesy the epithet of sonnet, is, in the opinion of the Author, rather an epigram. In the sonnet there should be a oneness of thought and feeling ; and this strict unity should pervade it from the beginning to the end: it should not conclude with a point; but the same austere energy with which it is closed should be conspicuous in its first line, and should equally pervade it as a whole. It seems peculiarly adapted as a vehicle for commemorating the more interesting impressions of life-the writer of it, if he have been accustomed to put down in this form his more vivid feelings, may look back upon a series of such compositions as containing a body of sentimental biography; and to him may be justly applied the description of Lucilius contained in the following lines of Horace : Ille velut fidis arcána sodalibus olim Credebat libris; neque, si male gesserat, usquam Vita senis. * The Author cannot so well express what further he may have to say on this subject, as by availing himself of the following paragraphs from the pen of Mr. Coleridge. "The sonnet is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed. It is limited to a particular number of lines, in order that the reader's mind, having expected the close at the place in which he finds it, may rest satisfied; and that so the poem may acquire, as it were, a totality-in plainer phrase, may become a Whole. It is confined to fourteen lines, because as some particular number is necessary, and that particular must be a small one, it may as well be fourteen as any other number. When no reason can be adduced against a thing, custom is a sufficient reason for it. Perhaps, if the sonnet were comprized in less than fourteen lines, it would become a serious epigram; if it extended to more, it would encroach on the province of the Elegy. Poems, in which no lonely* feeling is developed, are not Sonnets, because the Author has chosen to write them in fourteen lines: they should rather be entitled Odes, or Songs, or Inscriptions. "In a sonnet, then, we require a development of some lonely feeling, by whatever cause it may have been excited, in which moral sentiments, affections, or feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature. Such compositions generate a habit of thought highly favourable to delicacy of character. They create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world. Easily remembered from their briefness, and interesting alike to the eye and the affections, these are the poems which we can lay up in our heart, and in our soul,' and repeat them when we walk by the way, and when we lie down, and when we rise up.' The author is sorry, after having made this beautiful extract from the Introduction to the * The Author supposes, that by "lonely," Mr. Coleridge means "single" feeling, not solitary feeling. |