It is refreshing to lose the moony Tennysonian sensuousness which induced, with Lowell’s vigorous imagination, the blank artificiality of style which was visible in several of his early poems.  There was a tendency, too, to the Byzantine liberty of gilding the bronze of our common words, a palpable longing after the ississimus of Latin adjectives, of whose softness our muscular and variegated language will not admit.  Mr. Lowell’s Sonnets, too, we could wish unwritten, not from any defect in their construction, but from a fancied want of congeniality between their character and his own.  In spite of its Italian origin, the sonnet always seems to demand the severest classical outlines, both in spirit and expression, calm and steadfastly flowing without ripples or waves, a poem cut in the marble of stately cadences that imprison some vast and divine thought.  Lowell is too elastic, impulsive, for a sonneteer.  But considered apart from our peculiar ideas of the sonnet, the following is full of a very tender beauty:—­

  ’I ask not for those thoughts that sudden leap
  From being’s sea, like the isle-seeming Kraken,
  With whose great rise the ocean all is shaken,
  And a heart-tremble quivers through the deep;
  Give me that growth which some perchance deem sleep,
  Wherewith the steadfast coral-stems uprise,
  Which by the toil of gathering energies
  Their upward way into clear sunshine keep,
  Until, by Heaven’s sweetest influences,
  Slowly and slowly spreads a speck of green
  Into a pleasant island in the seas,
  Where, ’mid tall palms, the cave-roofed home is seen
  And wearied men shall sit at sunset’s hour,
  Hearing the leaves and loving God’s dear power.’

And what could be more drippingly quaint than his song to ‘Violets,’ which breathes so gentle and real a sympathy with its subject, that we almost imagine it was written in those early times when men communed with Nature in her own audible language.  It is even more beautiful than Herrick’s

  ’Why do ye weep, sweet babe?  Can tears
  Speak grief in you, who were but born
  Just as the modest morn
  Teemed her refreshing dew?’

We give but a fragment of the Violet.

  ’Violet! sweet violet! 
  Thine eyes are full of tears;
    Are they wet
    Even yet
  With the thought of other years? 
  Or with gladness are they full,
  For the night is beautiful,
  And longing for those far-off spheres? 
  Thy little heart, that hath with love
  Grown colored, like the sky above
  On which thou lookest ever—­
    Can it know
    All the woe
  Of hope for what returneth never,
  All the sorrow and the longing
  To these hearts of ours belonging?’

And there are touches of what we are wont to call dear, womanly feeling, as when the ‘Forlorn,’ out in the bitter cold,

  ’Hears a woman’s voice within
    Singing sweet words her childhood knew,
  And years of misery and sin
    Furl off and leave her heaven blue.’