This famous sonnet was called by Coleridge "the best in the English language." He seems, however, to have been led to this opinion rather by the thought than the form. I met a traveler 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 shatter'd visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamp'd 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. (SHELLEY: _Ozymandias of Egypt_. 1817.) Shelley wrote but few sonnets, and all but one (_To the Nile_) are irregular in structure. The rime-scheme of the present specimen is, of course, wholly eccentric. 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. (KEATS: _The Grasshopper and Cricket_. 1817.) Keats's sonnets are for the most part regular in both rime-scheme and bipartite structure; but a number of the posthumous sonnets are in the English form. The present specimen (which competes with the more familiar sonnet on _Chapman's Homer_ for the chief place among those of Keats) is a particularly good example of the bipartite structure and its organic relation to the thought of the sonnet. Amazing monster! that, for aught I know, With the first sight of thee didst make our race Forever stare! O flat and shocking face, Grimly divided from the breast below! Thou that on dry land horribly dost go With a split body and most ridiculous pace, Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace, Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow! O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air, How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry And dreary sloth! What particle canst thou share Of the only blessed life, the watery? I sometimes see of ye an actual _pair_ Go by, linked fin by fin! most odiously. (LEIGH HUNT: _The Fish to the Man_. 1836.)