sweetness, a felicity of workmanship hardly to
be excelled. In her best songs, Miss Rossetti is scarcely, if at all,
his inferior; but her judgment was far less sure, and she was more ready
to look with complacency on her failures. The songs of Mr. Aubrey de
Vere are not well enough known; they are sometimes singularly charming.
Other poets have once or twice succeeded in catching this clear natural
treble,--the living linnet once captured in the elm, as Tusitala puts
it; but this has not been a gift largely enjoyed by our Victorian
poets._

_The richer and more elaborate forms of lyric, on the contrary, have
exactly suited this curious and learned age of ours. The species of
verse which, originally Italian or French, have now so abundantly and so
admirably been practised in England that we can no longer think of them
as exotic, having found so many exponents in the Victorian period that
they are pre-eminently characteristic of it. "Scorn not the Sonnet,"
said Wordsworth to his contemporaries; but the lesson has not been
needed in the second half of the century. The sonnet is the most solid
and unsingable of the sections of lyrical poetry; it is difficult to
think of it as chanted to a musical accompaniment. It is used with great
distinction by writers to whom skill in the lighter divisions of poetry
has been denied, and there are poets, such as Bowles and Charles
Tennyson-Turner, who live by their sonnets alone. The practice of the
sonnet has been so extended that all sense of monotony has been lost. A
sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning differs from one by D. G. Rossetti
or by Matthew Arnold to such excess as to make it difficult for us to
realize that the form in each case is absolutely identical._

_With the sonnet might be mentioned the lighter forms of elaborate
exotic verse; but to these a word shall be given later on. More closely
allied to the sonnet are those rich and somewhat fantastic
stanza-measures in which Rossetti delighted. Those in which Keats and
the Italians have each their part have been greatly used by the
Victorian poets. They lend themselves to a melancholy magnificence, to
pomp of movement and gorgeousness of color; the very sight of them gives
the page the look of an ancient blazoned window. Poems of this class are
"The Stream's Secret" and the choruses in "Love is enough." They satisfy
the appetite of our time for subtle and vague analysis of emotion, for
what appeals to the spirit through t