se softness our muscular and variegated language will
not admit. Mr. Lowell's Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from
any defect in their construction, but from a fancied want of
congeniality between their character and his own. In spite of its
Italian origin, the sonnet always seems to demand the severest classical
outlines, both in spirit and expression, calm and steadfastly flowing
without ripples or waves, a poem cut in the marble of stately cadences
that imprison some vast and divine thought. Lowell is too elastic,
impulsive, for a sonneteer. But considered apart from our peculiar ideas
of the sonnet, the following is full of a very tender beauty:--

'I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap
From being's sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,
With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken,
And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;
Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep,
Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise,
Which by the toil of gathering energies
Their upward way into clear sunshine keep,
Until, by Heaven's sweetest influences,
Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green
Into a pleasant island in the seas,
Where, 'mid tall palms, the cave-roofed home is seen
And wearied men shall sit at sunset's hour,
Hearing the leaves and loving God's dear power.'

And what could be more drippingly quaint than his song to 'Violets,'
which breathes so gentle and real a sympathy with its subject, that we
almost imagine it was written in those early times when men communed
with Nature in her own audible language. It is even more beautiful than
Herrick's

'Why do ye weep, sweet babe? Can tears
Speak grief in you, who were but born
Just as the modest morn
Teemed her refreshing dew?'

We give but a fragment of the Violet.

'Violet! sweet violet!
Thine eyes are full of tears;
Are they wet
Even yet
With the thought of other years?
Or with gladness are they full,
For the night is beautiful,
And longing for those far-off spheres?
Thy little heart, that hath with love
Grown colored, like the sky above
On which thou lookest ever--
Can it know
All the woe
Of hope for what returneth never,
All the sorrow and the longing
To these hearts of ours belonging?'

And there are touches of what we are wont to call dear, womanly feeling,
as when the 'Forlorn,' out in the bitter cold,

'Hears a woman's voice within
Singin