ines and the six instead
of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking
of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to
Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.

There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it,
that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names
has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being
universally recognized. Shakspeare could do anything. But the
greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their
being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that
form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not
exist. They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they
might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day.
That is part of our great debt to Milton. He could not give the sonnet
the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled
it. He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have
proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be
balanced by sterner matter. Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's
infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery.
But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity
and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship. And no
just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets
Milton's share in their greatness. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has
lately remarked that it is in the _Prelude_ and _Excursion_ of {137}
Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself
Milton's spiritual legacy is employed." The same thing may be as truly
said of Wordsworth's sonnets. If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the
thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his
own. He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on
the whole that England has known. He used it far more freely than
Milton and for more varied purposes. Perhaps it hardly afforded room
enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness. It is
seldom possible to do justice to a quotation from _Paradise Lost_
without giving at least twenty lines. The sense, and especially the
musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a
series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which
cannot be detached from each other with