Oh it is pleasant, with a heart at ease, Just after sunset, or by moonlight skies, To make the shifting clouds be what you please, Or let the easily-persuaded eyes Own each quaint likeness issuing from the mould Of a friend's fancy; or, with head bent low And cheek aslant, see rivers flow of gold 'Twixt crimson bank; and then, a traveler, go From mount to mount through Cloudland, gorgeous land! Or listening to the tide, with closed sight, Be that blind bard who, on the Chian strand By those deep sounds possessed with inward light, Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea. (COLERIDGE: _Fancy in Nubibus_. 1819.) The sonnets of Coleridge, as has already been noted, were written under the influence of those of Bowles, and are not of the Italian type. He defined the sonnet as "a short poem in which some lonely feeling is developed," thus emphasizing, like Wordsworth, the idea of unity rather than of progressive structure. Darkly, as by some gloomed mirror glassed, Herein at times the brooding eye beholds The great scarred visage of the pompous Past, But oftener only the embroidered folds And soiled regality of his rent robe, Whose tattered skirts are ruined dynasties And cumber with their trailing pride the globe, And sweep the dusty ages in our eyes; Till the world seems a world of husks and bones Where sightless Seers and Immortals dead, Kings that remember not their awful thrones, Invincible armies long since vanquished, And powerless potentates and foolish sages Lie 'mid the crumbling of the mossy ages. (WILLIAM WATSON: _History_.) FOOTNOTES: [35] It will perhaps be found of interest to reproduce the "Ten Commandments of the Sonnet" given by Mr. Sharp in his Introduction to _Sonnets of this Century_ (p. lxxviii): "1. The sonnet must consist of fourteen decasyllabic lines. "2. Its octave, or major system, whether or not this be marked by a pause in the cadence after the eighth line, must (unless cast in the Shakespearian mould) follow a prescribed arrangement in the rhyme-sounds--namely, the first, fourth, fifth, and eighth lines must rhyme on the same sound, and the second, third, sixth, and seventh on another. "3. Its sestet, or minor system, may be arranged with more freedom, but a rhymed couplet at the close is only allowable when the form is the English or Shakespearian. "4. No terminal should also occur in any other portion of any other line in the same system; and the rhyme-sounds (1) of the octave should be harmoniously at variance, and (2) the rhyme-sounds of the sestet should be entirely distinct in intonation from those of the octave.... "5. It must have no slovenliness of diction, no weak or indeterminate terminations, no vagueness of conception, and no obscurity.