be recognized as the accepted English form. Its characteristic feature,
as the following sonnet from Shakespeare will show, was a division into
three distinct quatrains, each with alternating rimes, and closed by a
couplet. The transition of thought at the ninth line is usually
observed:--

"When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee--and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings."

It is Milton's merit that he rescued the sonnet from the snare of verbal
wit in which the Elizabethans had involved it, and made it respond to
other passions than that of love. His sonnets, as imitations of the
Italian form, are more successful than the scattered efforts in that
direction of Wyatt and Surrey. They are indeed regular in all respects,
save that he is not always careful to observe the pause in the thought,
and the subtle change which should divide the octave from the sestet.

After Milton there is a pause in sonnet-writing for a hundred years.
William Lisles Bowles (1762-1850), memorable for his influence upon
Coleridge, was among the first again to cultivate the form. Coleridge
and Shelley gave the sonnet scant attention, and were careless as to its
structural qualities. Keats, apart from Wordsworth, was the only poet of
the early years of the century who realized its capabilities. He has
written a few of our memorable sonnets, but he was not entirely satisfied
with the accepted form, and experimented upon variations that cannot be
regarded as successful.

There is no doubt that the stimulus to sonnet-writing in the nineteenth
century came from Wordsworth, and he, as all his recent biographers
admit, received his inspiration from Milton. Wordsworth's sonnets, less
remarkable certainly than a supreme few of Shakespeare's, have still
imposed themselves as models upon all later writers, while the
Shakespearean form has fallen into disuse. A word here, the