“Wotton, fair Wotton, thine ancestral hall,
      Thy green fresh meadows, coursed by ductile streams,
      That ripple joyous in the noonday beams,
    Leaping adown the frequent waterfall,
        Thy princely forest, and calm slumbering lake
    Are hallowed spots and classic precincts all;
      For in thy terraced walks and beechen grove
      The gentle, generous Evelyn wont to rove,
        Peace-lover, who of nature’s garden spake
    From cedars to the hyssop on the wall! 
    O righteous spirit, fall’n on evil times,
      Thy loyal zeal and learned piety
    Blest all around thee, wept thy country’s crimes,
      And taught the world how Christians live and die.”

The sonnet is a form of metrical composition which has been habitual with me, as my volume “Three Hundred Sonnets” will go to prove; and I have written quite a hundred more.  The best always come at a burst, spontaneously and as it were inspirationally.  A laboured sonnet is a dull piece of artificial rhyming, and as it springs not from the heart of the writer, fails to reach the heart of the reader.  If the metal does not flow out quick and hot, there never can be a sharp casting.  Good sonnets are crystals of the heart and mind, perfect from beginning to end, and are only unpopular where poetasters make a carnal toil of them instead of finding them a spiritual pleasure.  But one who knows his theme may write reams about sonneteering; for instance, see that striking article on Shakespeare’s sonnets in a recent Fortnightly (or was it a Contemporary?) by Charles Mackay, himself one of our literary worthiest, who has so well worked through a long life for his country and his kind:  my best regards to him.

His discovery, or rather ingenious hypothesis, quite new to me, is, that some of the one hundred and fifty-four in that collection are by other writers than Shakespeare, though falsely printed under his name, and that some more (though by him) were written impersonately in the characters of Essex and Elizabeth; which would account for an awkward confusion of the sexes hitherto inexplicable.  Mackay thinks that the publisher included any sonnets by others which he thought worthy of the great bard, as if they were his, and so caused the injurious and wrong appropriation; most of them are exquisite, and many undoubtedly Shakespeare’s; some I have said probably by another hand.  Critically speaking too, not one of all the one hundred and fifty-four is of the conventional and elaborate fourteen-liner sort, with complicated rhymes; but each is a lyrical gem of three four-line stanzas closed by a distich.  Milton’s eighteen are all of the more artificial Petrarchian sort; which Wordsworth has diligently made his model in more than four hundred instances of very various degrees in merit.

As I am writing a short memoir of my books, I may state that my own small quarto of sonnets grew out of the “Modern Pyramid.”