Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 19.djvu/520

510  REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Leigh Hunt was a man of genius, or only of surpassing talent, is a question which we willingly leave to the critics who find tweedledee different from tweedledum in kind as well as degree. We are content with the fact that he has some virtue which makes us read every book of his we open, and which leaves us more his friend at the end than we were before. Indeed, it would be hard not to love so cheerful and kindly a soul, even if his art were ever less than charming. But literature seems to have always been a gay science with him. We never see his Muse as the harsh step-mother she really was: we are made to think her a gentle liege-lady, served in the airiest spirit of chivalric devotion; and in the Essay in this "Book of the Sonnet" her aspect is as sunny as any the poet has ever shown us.

The Essay is printed for the first time, and it was written in Hunt's old age; but it is full of light-heartedness, and belongs in feeling to a period at least as early as that which produced the "Stories from the Italian Poets." It is one of those studies in which he was always happy, for it keeps him chiefly in Italy; and when it takes him from Italy, it only brings him into the Italian air of English sonnetry,—a sort of soft Devonshire coast, bordering the ruggeder native poetry on the south.

The essayist seems to renew himself in the draughts he makes from the immortal youth of the Italian sonneteers,—he has so fresh and unalloyed a pleasure in them and their art, he is so generously tender of their artifice, and so quick to all their excellence. He traces the history of the sonnet in its native country, from the time it first received "its right workmanlike treatment" at the hands of Fra Guittone d' Arezzo, through those of Dante, who ought have "set the pattern of the sonnet to succeeding ages, and elevated the nature of its demands besides," but preferred to fritter his powers away in the Divina Commedia—through those of Petrarch, who did perfect the sonnet, and set the pattern of it,—through those of Giusti de Conti, the first imitator of Petrarch,—through those of Ariosto and of Giovanni della Casa, who varied it from the Petrarchan pattern,—through those of Marini, the Neapolitan poet, who corrupted it and everything else in Italian literature for a time,—through those of the many-piping shepherds of the famous poetic Arcadia, who restored the sonnet and the rest of Italian poetry with milk from their own pastures and water carefully bottled at Castaly,—down to those of Alfieri, who seems to have been the first in latter days to turn it to political account. In a tone equally joyous and affectionate the author gives the sonnet*s English history, from the time of its introduction by Wyatt up to our own day. The rules which govern this species of composition are lightly but distinctly suggested before its history begins; and throughout it is championed with graceful earnestness.

The Essay, in fine, is one well fitted to convince the lovers of the sonnet of its excellence, and to leave the mass of mankind as incapable of enjoying it as ever. In no language but Italian has any great poet done his best within the sonnet's narrow bounds, and in Italian the greatest of the sonneteers was not the first of the poets. We are far from scorning the sonnet; we suspect it is a difficult thing to make, and we know it is not easy to read, and we honor it, though we cannot love it. We would not have Poesy to be greatly millinered, whatever fashions other ladies may adopt; and when we meet her corseted in the iron framework of the sonnet's rhymes, and crinolined about with the unyielding drapery of its fourteen lines, we feel that she is no doubt elegantly dressed, but we long to see her in any other attire she is wont to put on.

We are unable, therefore, to lament, with Mr. S. Adams Lee, the surviving editor (as, with a curious misconception of the facts, he calls himself) of "The Book of the Sonnet," that American poets have so little practised the art of sonnetry; and we should not think at all ill of them on this account, but for the surviving editor's opinion, that our poets generally have neglected the sonnet, because it cannot be "dashed off at a heat." The idle rogues, it seems, prefer to "embody their conceptions in