eral of these best ones seem to have been
early work, and rejected by Keats in his lifetime, while
some of those he printed are absolutely sorry drafts.

I had admired Coleridge's sonnet on Schiller's _Robbers_ for
the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the
mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is
unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful
scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually,
however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton's
sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the
modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must
of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been
that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (_Avenge, O
Lord_), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (_When I
consider_ and _Methought I saw_), and one of the poorest
sonnets (_Harry, whose tuneful_, etc.) in English poetry.

At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble
published an essay on _The Sonnet in England_ in _The
Contemporary Review_, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote:

I have just been reading Mr. Noble's article on the sonnet.
As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets
me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all
the more pleasant to me as finding a place in the very
Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous
attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the
article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a
work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only
trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a
field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to
think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good
many years published and several years out of print, it yet
meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men.

With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally
sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to
Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal
in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his
sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is
tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good
accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on _Toussaint
L'Ouverture_ (in my opinion his noblest, and v