ke sunbeams shone,
I heard those lips breathe low and plaintive moan,
Whose spell might once have taught the hills their places.
Love, wisdom, courage, tenderness, and truth,
Made in their mourning strains more high and dear
Than ever, wove sweet sounds for mortal ear;
And Heaven seemed listening in such saddest ruth
The very leaves upon the boughs to soothe,
Such passionate sweetness filled the atmosphere.

These sonnets are in Petrarch's earlier manner; but the death of Laura
brought a change. Look at yonder schooner coming down the bay, straight
toward us; she is hauled close to the wind, her jib is white in the
sunlight, her larger sails are touched with the same snowy lustre, and
all the swelling canvas is rounded into such lines of beauty as nothing
else in the world--not even the perfect outlines of the human form--can
give. Now she comes up into the wind, and goes about with a strong
flapping of the sails, which smites our ears at a half-mile's distance;
and she then glides off on the other tack, showing us the shadowed side
of her sails, until she reaches the distant zone of haze. So change the
sonnets after Laura's death, growing shadowy as they recede, until the
very last seems to merge itself in the blue distance.

SONNET 251.

"_Gli occhi di ch' io parlai._"

Those eyes, 'neath which my passionate rapture rose,
The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile
Could my own soul from its own self beguile,
And in a separate world of dreams enclose,
The hair's bright tresses, full of golden glows,
And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
Which changed this earth to some celestial isle,
Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.

"And yet I live!" What immeasurable distances of time and thought are
implied in the self-recovery of those words. Shakespeare might have
taken from them his "Since Cleopatra died,"--the only passage in
literature which has in it the same wide spaces of emotion. There is a
vastness of transition in each, which, if recited by Fanny Kemble, would
take one's breath away.

The next sonnet seems to me the most stately