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I
NUNS fret not at their convent’s narrow room; | |
| And hermits are contented with their cells; | |
| And students with their pensive citadels; | |
| Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, | |
| Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, | 5 |
| High as the highest peak of Furness-fells, | |
| Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: | |
| In truth the prison, unto which we doom | |
| Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, | |
| In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound | 10 |
| Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; | |
| Pleased if some souls (for such there needs must be) | |
| Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, | |
| Should find brief solace there, as I have found. | |
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II
SCORN not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown’d, | 15 |
| Mindless of its just honours; with this key | |
| Shakespeare unlock’d his heart; the melody | |
| Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; | |
| A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; | |
| With it Cam˜ens sooth’d an exile’s grief; | 20 |
| The Sonnet glitter’d a gay myrtle leaf | |
| Amid the cypress with which Dante crown’d | |
| His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp, | |
| It cheer’d mild Spenser, call’d from Faery-land | |
| To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp | 25 |
| Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand | |
| The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew | |
| Soul-animating strains—alas, too few! | |
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