al character than any others; and they acquire a double value when
we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets.
Compared with _Paradise_ Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn
the base of some proud column or stately temple. The author in the one
could work himself up with unabated fortitude 'to the height of his
great argument'; but in the other he has shown that he could condescend
to men of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunderbolt of
his pen, lets fall some drops of natural pity over hapless infirmity,
mingling strains with the nightingale's, 'most musical, most
melancholy.' The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our
breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly
hand he presses. The Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past
achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself
to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them
are of a more quaint and humorous character; but I speak of those only
which are intended to be serious and pathetical.--I do not know indeed
but they may be said to be almost the first effusions of this sort of
natural and personal sentiment in the language. Drummond's ought
perhaps to be excepted, were they formed less closely on the model
of Petrarch's, so as to be often little more than translations of
the Italian poet. But Milton's Sonnets are truly his own in allusion,
thought, and versification. Those of Sir Philip Sydney, who was a
great transgressor in his way, turn sufficiently on himself and his own
adventures; but they are elaborately quaint and intricate, and more like
riddles than sonnets. They are 'very tolerable and not to be endured.'
Shakespear's, which some persons better informed in such matters than I
can pretend to be, profess to cry up as 'the divine, the matchless, what
you will,'--to say nothing of the want of point or a leading, prominent
idea in most of them, are I think overcharged and monotonous, and as to
their ultimate drift, as for myself, I can make neither head nor tail
of it. Yet some of them, I own, are sweet even to a sense of faintness,
luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxuriant like it. Here is
one:

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell