Sonnets and Canzonets. Alcott Amos Bronson

always dwelling nigh is the remotest star.”

      Here, as Landor said, “is a sonnet, and the sonnet admits not that approach to the prosaic which is allowable in the ballad.” For this reason Mr. Alcott, who began his poetical autobiography, when he was eighty years old, in a ballad measure, has now passed into the majesty of the sonnet, as he has come to those passages of life which will not admit prosaic treatment. Moderately used, and not worked to death, as Wordsworth employed it, the sonnet is a great uplifter of poesy. It calls to the reader, as the early Christian litanies did to the worshipper, Sursum corda, Raise your thoughts! The canzonet lets us down again into the pathetic, the humorous, or the fanciful, – though in this volume the canzonet generally betokens sadness. It may easily become an ode, as in the verses on Garfield: indeed the ode may be considered as an extended canzonet, or the canzonet as a brief ode. It is the sonnet that chiefly concerns us now, and that form of the sonnet which deals with love; since the germ of this book was a romance of love, seeking to express itself in the uplifting strain and tender cadence of successive sonnets; which lead us though green pastures and beside the still waters, and then to the shore of the resounding sea, – itself worthy of a sonnet which I have somewhere heard: —

      “Ah mournful Sea! Yet to our eyes he wore