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.
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