The sonnets of Rossetti are undoubtedly the most perfect representatives of the Italian form in English poetry of the nineteenth century, and _The House of Life_ (in 101 sonnets) is probably to be regarded as the most important sonnet-sequence since the Elizabethan age. The bipartite character of Rossetti's sonnets is marked, in editions of his poems, by the printing of the octave and sestet with a space between them. They rose to where their sovran eagle sails, They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, armed by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails, And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and through the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years, Great Tsernagora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers. (TENNYSON: _Montenegro_. 1877.) It is curious that the two chief representatives of English poetry of the Victorian period, Tennyson and Browning, should neither of them have given much attention to the sonnet nor have achieved any notable success in the form. Among Tennyson's poems there are some seventeen sonnets, of which the present specimen was considered by the poet to be the best. It represents a common form of the bipartite structure, where the octave is a narrative, and the sestet a comment upon what has been narrated. In the following specimen, from Matthew Arnold, the structure is similar. Lentzner quotes the _East London_, in his monograph on the English sonnet, as a case where the octave represents the thought in particular, the sestet in the abstract; in other cases the order is the reverse. 'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his window seen In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 'Ill and o'er-worked, how fare you in this scene?' 'Bravely!' said he, 'for I of late have been Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the Living Bread!' O human soul! so long as thou canst so Set up a mark of everlasting light Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, To cheer thee and to right thee if thou roam, Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night! Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home. (MATTHEW ARNOLD: _East London_. 1867.)