agination the tool, and the body the plastic
material_," said a famous physician, who was also a practical man of the
world;--and the poet who identifies his will and imagination with the
eternal truths, who looks up to the stars instead of down into the mud,
may always, even in his weariest hours, cheer himself by mental
companionship with the other resolute souls whose pens have been used as
swords in the service of Divine Beauty.

Of all the most famous writers of Sonnets, it is Michelangelo whose
words come back most vividly to memory as we read the Nawab's
expressions of faith.

"_Love wakes the soul and gives it wings to fly_."

"_All beauty that to human sight is given
Is but the shadow, if we rightly see,
Of Him from Whom man's spirit issueth_."

"_As heat from fire, my love from the ideal
Is parted never_."

"_Oh noble spirit, noble semblance taking,
We mirrored in Thy mortal beauty see
What Heaven and earth achieve in harmony_."

Thus wrote Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna (Marchioness of Pescara),
"being enamoured of her divine spirit";[B] and though in the Sonnets of
the Nawab, who uses what is for him a foreign tongue, the ideal is
sometimes greater than the expression of it, yet the spirit shines out
with a light which none can mistake. And whether the average man accepts
or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will
recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble ideal,
fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,--neither of them
cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men who
lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they viewed
with wide-open eyes and unflinching minds.

The chivalrous ideal of an exalted and inspiring love can be rejected if
we please;--but let none claim to be manly because this ideal seems too
ethereal. For it is by the most vigorous, most strenuous, and most
commanding souls and minds that this faith in the Eternal Beauty has
been cherished and upheld most ardently and resolutely.

_September 29, 1917_.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See "Note on the History of the Sonnet in English Literature," below.

[B] Ascanio Condivi's "Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti."

NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF THE SONNET IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Now that Italy holds such a brilliant place among our Allies during this
the greatest war in the world's history--the war of chivalry (which is
to say m