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                      SONNETS

                        AND

                     CANZONETS.


                         BY

                  A. BRONSON ALCOTT.


          “LOVE CAN SUN THE REALMS OF LIGHT.”
                                  _Schiller._


                       BOSTON:

                  ROBERTS BROTHERS.

                        1882.


                 _Copyright, 1882_,
               BY A. BRONSON ALCOTT.


                  UNIVERSITY PRESS:
            JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.




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                          CONTENTS.

                        INTRODUCTION.

                                                                PAGE

  TO A. BRONSON ALCOTT, A LETTER BY F. B. SANBORN               5-10

  AN ESSAY ON THE SONNET                                       11-35

  SONNETS OF ILLUSTRATION                                      21-35
       I. Love in Spring                                          21
      II. The Maiden in April                                     22
     III. The Estrangement                                        23
      IV. Love in Time                                            24
       V. To those of Noble Heart                                 24
      VI. The Ocean a blessed God                                 27
     VII. The Nightingale                                         28
    VIII. The Fair Saint                                          29
      IX. Love a Poor Palmer                                      30
       X. Love against Love                                       31
      XI. Death                                                   32
     XII. Ah, Sweet Content!                                      34
    XIII. The Poet’s Immortality                                  34

                         PART FIRST.
  PROEM                                                           39
  DOMESTIC SONNETS AND CANZONETS                                41-8

                        PART SECOND.
  SONNETS OF CHARACTER                                        94-145
  A PROPHETIC ODE                                            146-149

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TO A. BRONSON ALCOTT,

UPON READING HIS OCTOGENARIAN POEMS.


The period to which the scholar of two and eighty years belongs, is
seldom that of his youngest readers: it is more likely to be the epoch
of his own golden youth, when his masters were before his eyes, and
his companions were the books and the friends of his heart. Thus the
aged Landor could not bring his thoughts down from the grand forms of
Greek and Roman literature to which they were early accustomed; he had
swerved now and then from that loyalty in middle life, impressed and
acted upon as he was by the great political events of the Napoleonic
era,--but he returned to the epigram and the idyl in the “white winter
of his age,” and the voices of the present and of the future appealed
to him in vain. In the old Goethe there was something more prophetic
and august; he came nearer to his contemporaries, and prepared the way
for a recognition of his greatness by the generation which saw the
grave close over him. In this, that strange but loyal disciple of his,
the Scotch Carlyle, rendered matchless service to his master; yet he,
too, in his unhappy old age, could only at intervals, and by gleams
of inspiration,--as at the Edinburgh University Festival,--come into
communication with the young spirits about him. To you, dear Friend
and Master, belongs the rare good fortune (good genius rather) that
has brought you in these late days, into closer fellowship than of
yore with the active and forthlooking spirit of the time. In youth and
middle life you were in advance of your period, which has only now
overtaken you when it must, by the ordinance of Nature, so soon bid
you farewell, as you go forward to new prospects, in fairer worlds
than ours.

It is this union of youth and age, of the past and the present--yes,
and the future also--that I have admired in these artless poems, over
which we have spent together so many agreeable hours. Fallen upon an
age in literature when the poetic form is everywhere found, but the
discerning and inventive spirit of Poesy seems almost lost, I have
marked with delight in these octogenarian verses, flowing so naturally
from your pen, the very contradiction of this poetic custom of the
period. Your want of familiarity with the accustomed movement of verse
in our time, brings into more distinct notice the genuine poetical
motions of your genius. Having been admitted to the laboratory, and
privileged to witness the action and reaction of your thought, as it
crystallized into song, I perceived, for the first time, how high
sentiment, by which you have from youth been inspired, may become the
habitual movement of the mind, at an age when so many, if they live at
all in spirit, are but nursing the selfish and distorted fancies of
morose singularity. To you the world has been a brotherhood of noble
souls,--too few, as we thought, for your companionship,--but which you
have enlarged by the admission to one rank of those who have gone,
and of us who remain to love you and listen to your oracles. The men
and the charming women who recognized your voice when it was that of
one crying in the wilderness--“Prepare ye the way of our Lord,” are
joined, in your commemorative sonnets, with those who hearken to its
later accents, proclaiming the same acceptable year of the Lord.

It is the privilege of poets--immemorial and native to the clan--that
they should share the immortality they confer. This right you may
vindicate for your own. The honors you pay, in resounding verse, to
Channing, to Emerson, to Margaret Fuller, to Hawthorne, Thoreau,
and the rest of the company with whom you trod these groves, and
honored these altars of the Spirit unnamed, return in their echoes to
yourself. They had their special genius, and you yours no less, though
it found not the same expression with theirs. We please our love
with the thought that, in these sonnets and canzonets of affection,
you have celebrated yourself with them; that the swift insight, the
ennobling passion for truth and virtue, the high resolve, the austere
self-sacrifice, the gentle submission to a will eternally right, in
which these friends, so variously gifted, found a common tie,--all
these are yours also,--and may they be ours! The monuments and
trophies of genius are perishable, but the soul’s impression abides
forever, _forma mentis æterna_. To that imperishable, ever-beauteous,
self-renouncing, loyal, and steadfast Spirit of the Universe which
we learned to worship in our youth, and which has never forsaken our
age and bereavement, may these offerings, and all that we are, be
consecrated now and forever!

                                               F. B. SANBORN.

  CONCORD, January 1, 1882.

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AN ESSAY ON THE SONNET AND THE CANZONET.




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THE SONNET AND THE CANZONET.


“Scorn not the sonnet,” said Wordsworth, and then gave us at least
fifty noble reasons why we should not,--for so many at least of his
innumerable sonnets are above languor and indifference, and all of
them above contempt. Milton was more self-restrained than Wordsworth,
and wrote fewer sonnets, every one of which is a treasure, either for
beauty of verse, nobility of thought, happy portraiture of persons,
or quaint and savage humor,--like that on “Tetrachordon,” and the
elongated sonnet in which he denounces the Presbyterians, and tells
them to their face, “New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large.”
Shakespeare unlocked his heart with sonnets in another key than
Milton’s,--less conformed to the model of the Italian sonnet, but more
in keeping with English verse, of which Shakespeare had the entire
range. His sonnets are but quatrains following each other by threes,
with a resounding couplet binding them together in one sheaf, and
his example has made this form of the sonnet legitimate for all who
write English verse,--no