I must now group together a number of short notes on
sonnets:

I think Blanco White's sonnet difficult to overrate in
_thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy
to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is
the one fatally disenchanting line:

While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.

The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that
fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough
to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is
one more however which I don't know).

I'll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine
one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by
Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and
exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere
about 1840.

Even as yon lamp within my vacant room
With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night,
And can with its involuntary light
But lifeless things that near it stand illume;
Yet all the while it doth itself consume,
And ere the sun hath reached his morning height
With courier beams that greet the shepherd's sight,
There where its life arose must be its tomb:--
So wastes my life away, perforce confined
To common things, a limit to its sphere,
It gleams on worthless trifles undesign'd,
With fainter ray each hour imprison'd here.
Alas to know that the consuming mind
Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!

I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote
from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite
correctly....

I have just had Blanco White's only other sonnet (_On being
called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly
think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you
say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for
the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but
proseman's diction.

There is a sonnet of Chas. Wells's _On Chaucer_ which is not
worthy of its writer, but still you should have it. It
occurs among some prefatory tributes in _Chaucer
Modernised_, edited by E. H. Home. I don't know how you are
to get a copy, but the book is in the British Museum Rea