No. cv. JOHN HOGBEN. Mr. Hogben has as yet published little verse, and that only in magazines or weekly journals (the Spectator, etc.). He is the editor of "Keats" in the Canterbury Poets.

Nos. cvi.-cvii. THOMAS HOOD (1798-1845). These beautiful sonnets prove what an essentially true poet Hood was. His great fame as a humorist has overshadowed his claims to a high place among imaginative writers, How few of his contemporaries could have written that weird and impressive poem "The Haunted House," certainly none could have surpassed it. The sonnet on "Silence" here given is not only exceedingly beautiful, but ranks among the twelve finest sonnets in the language.

RICHARD HENGIST HORNE (1803-1884). The late R. Hengist Horne passed away in a very faint adumbration of that high reputation he once enjoyed. From the early days of "the farthing Epic"-Orion-to the publication of the Bible Tragedies, what changes! No poet of this generation more lived his life than did "Orion:" he seems to have dwelt in, or at any rate visited, all the habitable (and several of the unhabitable) parts of the globe. Among his friends he numbered most of the leading poets and writers of this century, and among his constant correspondents was the late Mrs. Browning. He had an eminently fine presence, though when I last saw him he was manifestly yielding under the assaults of age and prolonged activity. Of all his works, personally I consider the most delightful to be Cosmo de Medici: and other Poems: among the short poems in which there is one called, if I remember aright, "The Slave," which for glowing richness of colouring seems to me unsurpassed in modern verse. Horne was not a sonnetwriter: the following, with all its faults, is, so far as I know, the only one deserving the name. It was written on December 26th, 1879, and was inscribed to the same Mr. Ellis whose sonnet "Silence" I have quoted on page 77.

THE FRIEND OF FRIENDS.

Inscribed to Joseph Ellis, author of "Cæsar in Egypt.”
Who is the Friend-of-Friends?-not one who smiles
While you are prosperous,-purse-full, in fair fame
Flattering, "Come, be my household's altar-flame,"
When knowing you can bask on sunny isles:

Not one who sayeth, "That brain's a mighty mould,"
With base-coin'd hints about alloys in gold:
Nor he who frankly tells you all your faults,
But drops all merit into vampire-vaults:-

No: the true friend stands close 'midst circling storms,
When you are poor,-lost,-wrestling thro' a cloud;
With whom your ship rides high in friezing calms,
Its banner, ghostly pale, to him still proud;

Whose heart's Blest-Arab-spice dead hope embalms,

The same, tho' you sate throned, - -or waiting for your shroud. No. cviii. CHARLES A. HOUFE. A young writer, who, if he will eschew the crudities manifest in the little volume he recently published anonymously, will probably do good work. The sonnet quoted has the stamp of genuine poetry.

No. cix. LORD HOUGHTON (18---1885). The late Lord Houghton had from his early youth close connection with literature, few names having been more familiar in the literary circles of the last generation or two than "Monckton Milnes." His poetic work is more graceful, refined, and scholarly, than imaginative or strongly emotional.

Nos. cx.-cxi. LEIGH HUNT (1784-1859). We owe Leigh Hunt's splendid Nile-sonnet to a friendly competition between himself and two still greater poets, Keats and Shelley. It is strange that a motif so eminently suited to the highest poetic genius should have been treated in inverse ratio to the intellectual and poetic powers of the competitors, for undoubtedly Hunt's ranks first, Keats's second, and Shelley's last. I append, for comparison, the rival sonnets.

Month after month the gathered rains descend
Drenching yon secret Ethiopian dells,
And from the desert's ice-girt pinnacles

Where frost, and heat in strange embraces blend
On Atlas, fields of moist snow half depend.

Girt there with blasts and meteors Tempest dwells
By Nile's aerial urn; with rapid spells

Urging those waters to their mighty end

O'er Egypt's land of memory floods are level

And they are thine, O Nile--and well thou knowest

That soul-sustaining airs and blasts of evil

And fruits and poisons spring where'er thou flowest. Beware, O Man-for knowledge must to thee

Like the great flood to Egypt, ever be.

-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

Son of the old moon-mountains African!
Stream of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing's inward span:
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Those men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest them a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err! They surely do:
"Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew

Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sun-rise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

-JOHN KEATS.

Strangely, it is also to a friendly competition that is due the composition of 'The Grasshopper and Cricket.' Mr. Cowden Clarke has told us in his Recollections, how, on 30th December 1816, he accompanied Keats on a visit to Leigh Hunt at the latter's cottage in the Vale of Health, Hampstead Heath, and how Hunt challenged Keats to write "then, there, and to time," a sonnet On the Grasshopper and the Cricket.' Keats gained the victory over his rival in point of time. Both are eminently characteristic, the one unmistakably by the author of Endymion, the other suffused with the genial sunshinyness pervading the nature and poetic work of its author. Here is Keats's :

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead :
That is the grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,-he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of the earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the store there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

No. cxii. J. W. INCHBOLD.

Mr. Inchbold has made the 'sonnet' a special study, and has himself written many pleasant examples in a little volume entitled Annus Amoris, published in 1876. (H. S. King & Co.)

JEAN INGELOW. By a slip the following sonnet by Miss Ingelow was not printed in its right place. It is from her Collected Poems, so widely popular.

AN ANCIENT CHESS KING.

Haply some Rajah first in ages gone
Amid his languid ladies finger'd thee,
While a black nightingale, sun-swart as he,
Sang his one wife, love's passionate orison :
Haply thou may'st have pleased old Prester John
Among his pastures, when full royally

He sat in tent-grave shepherd at his knee-
While lamps of balsam winked and glimmered on.

What dost thou here? Thy masters are all dead;
My heart is full of ruth and yearning pain
At sight of thee, O king that hast a crown
Outlasting theirs, and tells of greatness fled
Through cloud-hung nights of unabated rain
And murmur of the dark majestic town.

No. cxiii. EBENEZER JONES (1820-1860). This author wrote no more than two or three sonnets.

Nos. cxiv.-cxix. JOHN KEATS (1795-1821). Keats wrote fifty sonnets (or, rather fifty-one, including that recently brought to the notice of Mr. Sydney Colvin), but only a little over a third of these rank as really fine. Every one who knows Keats's poems knows by heart, or is thoroughly familiar with the famous sonnet," On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" A special interest attaches to No. cxix. It was Keats's last sonnet, indeed his last poem. On that last journey of his, when the vessel that was conveying him to Italy was beating about in the British Channel, he and his loyal friend Joseph Severn managed to land for a few hours on the coast of Devon. From the depth of weariness, bodily and spiritual, Keats rallied marvellously under the effects of the

welcome change, and on his return to the ship he took up a volume of Shakespeare's Poems and wrote in it this sonnet beginning Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art,' returning the volume to Severn, to whom he had presented it a few days previously. It is among the most pathetic "last words" of poets. There is an alternative reading of the last line

And so live ever,-or else swoon to death,

but this lection is indubitably and in every way inferior.

No. cxx. FRANCES ANNE KEMBLE. Mrs. Kemble, so wellknown in her special sphere, is a very genuine poet. Some of her sonnets-several of them very beautiful-are more satisfactory in structure than this one, but none surpasses it in dignity and solemn pathos.

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834). An undue place has frequently of late been claimed for Lamb as a poet. That he had a keenly poetic nature goes without saying, but this premiss is certainly not enough for the deduction referred to. Mr. Main gives four of his sonnets in his Treasury, of which 'Work' and 'Leisure' are simply eminently characteristic of the man, and the other twain pleasant poems. Mr. Caine gives 'Work' and another ("A timid grace," etc.), whose chief interest lies in its evident relation to that well-loved sister whose is one of the most pathetic figures in the history of literature. The following sonnet on Innocence' is one that Lamb himself considered his best:

We were two pretty babes; the youngest she,
The youngest, and the loveliest far (I ween)
And INNOCENCE her name; the time has been
We two did love each other's company;
Time was, we two had wept to have been apart,
But when, by show of seeming good beguil'd,
I left the garb and manners of a child,
And my first love, for man's society,
Defiling with the world my virgin heart-
My lov'd companion dropt a tear, and fled,
And hid in deepest shades her awful head.
Beloved! who shall tell me, where thou art
In what delicious Eden to be found?

That I may seek thee, the wide world around.