in Latin Cromwell's sharp reply which protected the survivors. To the Puritans, the church of Rome was Babylon.

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant, that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

John Milton (1608-1674)

Wordsworth's sonnets do not show the sustained excellence of Shakespeare's, but for lofty theme and notable expression a few stand near the head of any list. Among this number are "London, 1802" and "The World is Too Much with Us," both of which voice a young poet's dissatisfaction with the spirit of his age.

LONDON, 1802

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.-Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

In his life and his poetry, Byron, like Milton, rendered service to the cause of human liberty. He met his death in Greece, whither he had gone to lend a hand in the

struggle for independence. "The Prisoner of Chillon" is widely known. We quote the prefatory sonnet. Chillon was an island prison in the Lake of Geneva; Bonnivard was a Genevan patriot imprisoned there at a time when the city was under foreign domination. Note that the typical rime order of the octave is not here observed.

SONNET ON CHILLON

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart-
The heart which love of Thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd—

To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom,
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.

Chillon! thy prison is a holy place

And thy sad floor an altar, for 'twas trod,
Until his very steps have left a trace

Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod,
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.

George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

Though Shelley, like Byron, wrote few sonnets, his "Ozymandias" was before Masefield perhaps the finest expression in English of the obliterating power of time—a power that literary art alone seems able to withstand. There was apparently no such ruler as Ozymandias; consequently Shelley coined for the king a sonorous imperial name. "Ozymandias" seemingly reflects its author's impression of Napoleon.

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear—
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

An excellent idea of the range of poetic subject matter may be acquired by comparing the foregoing sonnet and the following. The "king of kings" and the cricketthere is something in each for the interpretative imagination of the poet. "On the Grasshopper and Cricket" was composed under interesting circumstances. Cowden Clarke, Leigh Hunt, and Keats were passing an evening together discussing poetry. Keats maintained that poetry could be found in everything. Clarke was skeptical and, perhaps not knowing that Cowley and Lovelace had used it, suggested the grasshopper as an impossible subject. The result was two great sonnets, one by Keats and one by Hunt.

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,—he has never done

With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
John Keats (1795-1821)

Several nineteenth century poets have followed the Elizabethan custom of writing a cycle of sonnets on love. Meredith's Modern Love has been mentioned. Less analytic than Rossetti's The House of Life and less pretentious than Bridges's The Growth of Love, Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese constituted the most widely read cycle of the nineteenth century. The sonnets express vividly the romantic love of the author for her poet husband. Mrs. Browning was a brunette, and her husband often playfully termed her "the Portuguese”—a title under which, following the early custom of respectable women writers, she preserved her anonymity.