the close which would remove the whole poem from the Italian mould in which, despite many irregularities, nearly all Rossetti’s sonnets are cast. The sestet of “Lost Days” (like several others in the series) exemplifies what is generally held to be the best arrangement of the two-rhymed sestet in the Guittonian form,—that in which the first, third, and fifth terminals chime against the second, fourth, and sixth. Admirable as these four sonnets are, however, in clarity of thought and cumulative power, it is doubtful whether they should rank higher, from the broadest standards of poetry, than “Lost on Both Sides,” “Lovesight,” “Mid-rapture,” or “Supreme Surrender;” in all of which the gathering force of the motive sweeps in a fine torrent—mournful, searching, tender, or triumphant—to its eddying close, and the best tribute to the metrical art of each is that it conveys so perfectly the inmost fulness of the thought. Frequently, indeed, Rossetti ends a sonnet with a rhymed couplet on a new terminal sound, following a Guittonian quatrain, as in “Mid-Rapture,” “True Woman,” “Her Heaven,” and “The Song-Throe;” or in some cases following a Shakespearean quatrain after a Guittonian octet, as, for instance, in “Venus Victrix” and “The Love-Moon.” Very rarely does he compose a whole sonnet in the Shakespearean measure, namely, that in which the two rhyme-sounds of the doubled-quatrained octave occur in alternate lines, and the former of them is carried forward with a new rhyme for the similarly alternated quatrain of a sestet clenched with a rhyming couplet on another note, as in “Willow-Wood” (No. III.). The question of the legitimacy of a rhymed couplet at the close of anything but a wholly Shakespearean sonnet has been much debated by conflicting authorities on poetic form. The sonnet is at once the most elastic and the most arbitrary of vehicles for the concise embodiment of a single thought and its accessory similes. From the scholar’s point of view, no indiscriminate grafting of one essentially national and historic growth of form upon another is theoretically defensible. But, since no European language is of exclusive stock, the fusion of Latin and Saxon speech in the varied beauty of modern English seems hardly less anachronistic than the adaptation of traditional metres to the new requirements of the poetic faculties of the age. Akin to the “House of Life” in spirit and substance is “The Portrait;” a reminiscence, after the death of the loved model, of hours which saw the painting of the picture on a stormy summer day. Here the sonnet’s long- drawn strain gives place to a quicker measure: