ESSAY II.
ON MILTON’S SONNETS.
The great object of the Sonnet seems to be, to express in musical numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought or personal feeling, “some fee-grief due to the poet’s breast.” It is a sigh uttered from the fulness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration born and dying in the same moment. I have always been fond of Milton’s Sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and internal character than any others; and they acquire a double value when we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets. Compared with Paradise Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn the base of some proud column or stately temple. The author in the one could work himself up with unabated fortitude “to the height of his great argument;” but in the other he has shown that he could condescend to men of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunder-bolt of his
