That we, who of thine honour held the gain,
Should from its dignity thy form divorce.
Yet will we read in thy high vaunting name,
How Britain did what France could only dare,
And, while the sunset gilds the darkening air,
We will fill up thy shadowy lines with fame;
And, tomb or temple, hail thee still the same,
Home of great thoughts, memorial Téméraire !"

Poor Blanco White! Probably few of us in this city, where for some years he dwelt, are unacquainted with the main outlines of his mental and moral history. No sadder nor more pathetic story, none that more wrings the heart, has ever been written than that which his life records; how he passed from one form of Christian faith to another, how from that again to a third, and then passed out of all forms of belief into the dim darkness and uncertainty beyond. That, however, is a theme neither for this place nor time. It is not a little remarkable that he, to whom English was an acquired language, who can have had little or no experience in the mechanism of English verse, should yet have left us what Coleridge does not scruple to call "the finest and most grandly conceived Sonnet in our language." Coleridge, it is true slightly modifies these words by adding, "at least, it is only in Milton and in Wordsworth that I remember any rival." The grand thought of it, as you will perceive, is this. Night, which at first threatens to hide all things from view, in fact reveals to us those illimitable starry worlds of which, and of the existence of which, except for it, we should not have had the slightest suspicion. What if death, which in like manner threatens to hide so much, shall indeed reveal far more than it hides?

"Mysterious night! when our first parent knew
Thee from report divine, and heard thy name,

Did he not tremble for this lovely frame,
This glorious canopy of light and blue?
Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew,
Bathed in the rays the great setting flame,
Hesperus with the host of heaven came,
And lo! Creation widened in man's view.

Who could have thought such darkness lay concealed,
Within thy beams, O Sun! or who could find,
Whilst fly, and leaf, and insect stood revealed,
That to such countless orbs thou mad'st us blind?
Why do we then shun death with anxious strife?
If Light can thus deceive, wherefore not Life?"

I have now brought my subject, which, somewhat presumptuously, I have styled the History of the English Sonnet, to a close, or, at any rate, I have more than exhausted the time during which I have a right to claim your attention. There is one advantage which a lecture on such a theme, and managed as I have ventured to manage mine, can hardly fail to possess. It is thisthat even if the lecturer's own words are nought, or next to nought, have little value or none, still, if only he have skill enough to choose his specimens and examples well, he can hardly fail more or less to instruct and elevate his hearers, to bring before them something of high thought clothed in harmonious shapes, which either they have not heard before, or having heard, are willing to hear again. Let me trust that so it has this day been. Much is ever seeking to draw us downward, to ruffle the plumes of the soul, to clog them with the dust and defilements of earth. But next to those highest and most solemn influences, on which here is no place to dwell, next, although at an immeasurable distance, as enabling us to rise above "the smoke and stir of this dim spot," are the lofty thoughts of lofty-minded men, which they have clothed for all after-time in permanent

shapes of grace and harmony and strength. I am persuaded that having read thus far you will own with me, that of their loftiest, purest, tenderest, best, they have not thought it scorn to embody some portion in the form of the Sonnet; that it too has honour of its own -honour in which all who count that England's poetry is one of her richest inheritances may justly rejoice.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION.

SOME of my Friends having expressed a wish to see all the Sonnets that are scattered through several volumes of my Poems, brought under the eye at once; this is done in the present Publication, with a hope that a collection made to please a few, may not be unacceptable to many others.

My admiration of some of the Sonnets of Milton, first tempted me to write in that form. The fact is not mentioned from a notion that it will be deemed of any importance by the reader, but merely as a public ackno:ledgment of one of the innumerable obligations, which, as a Poet and a Man, I am under to our great fellowcountryman.

d

W. W.