His strength is in his shorter pieces; even where as in In Memoriam he has conceived and written something at once extended and beautiful, the beauty lies rather in the separate parts; the thing is more in the nature of a sonnet sequence than a continuous poem.

Lamb printed this sonnet twicein 1797 and 1818.

It has many quotable lines and passages, and its "Hymn to Pan" should be read in connection with Wordsworth's famous sonnet beginning, "The world is too much with us."

Mr. Moxon inscribes as a motto on his title-page four lines of Mr. Wordsworth's vindication of his own use of the sonnet-form In truth, the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me, In sundry moods 'twas pastime to be bound Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground.

[Footnote 19: Sonnet lxxix.

My practice has been to study in each sonnet the cadence both of thought and diction, so as to satisfy an English ear, accustomed to the various forms of termination exemplified by Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and Rossettithe sweetest, the most sublime, the least artificial, and the most artful sonnet-writers in our language.

[Footnote 13: Sonnet lxix.

Sonnet lxvi.

[Footnote 17: Sonnet xvii.

[Footnote 20: Sonnet lxxxiii.]

Were it not that I pity the multitude of printers, these sonnet-mongers should starve for conceits for all Phantastes.

The lines are knit together; sonnet-fashion, by the device of interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, and seventh lines rhyming.

He demonstrates mastery of the three when as a Negro poet he pours out the bitterness and rebellion in his heart in those two sonnet-tragedies, "If We Must Die" and "To the White Fiends," in a manner that strikes terror; and when as a cosmic poet he creates the atmosphere and mood of poetic beauty in the absolute, as he does in "Spring in New Hampshire" and "The Harlem Dancer."

Yet I must point to your notice a sonnet conceivd and expressed with a witty delicacy.

[Footnote 16: Sonnet viii.]

Sonnet iii, p. 43.

[Footnote 18: Sonnet lxi.]