In two of his finest sonnets, rich both in aesthetic and in spiritual beauty, and worthy both of Keats and Wordsworth, possibly suggesting the spirit of their finest sonnets, Lampman has summarized his poetic and philosophical creed. So beautiful in structure and imagery, so noble in their expression of the courage and serenity and faith which obtain in his _Sapphics_, and yet so wistful of the heavenly beauty and so infused with the pathos of life are these sonnets, that they move the soul and subdue the spirit with ‘thoughts too deep for tears.’ If there is any genuine meaning to Arnold’s conception of the moral dignity and spiritual function of poetry as ‘the profound and powerful application of ideas of life,’ these two sonnets by Lampman quite match the finest sonnets of the same degree of poetic vision by Keats, Wordsworth, and Arnold:— I Not to be conquered by these headlong days, But to stand free; to keep the mind at brood On life’s deep meaning, nature’s altitude Or loveliness, and time’s mysterious ways; At every thought and deed to clear the haze Out of our eyes, considering only this, What man, what life, what love, what beauty is, This is to live, and win the final praise. Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb, With agony; yet, patience—there shall come Many great voices from life’s outer sea, Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed, Murmurs and glimpses of eternity. II There is a beauty at the goal of life, A beauty growing since the world began, Through every age and race, through lapse and strife, Till the great human soul complete her span: Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn, The currents of blind passion that appal, To listen and keep watch till we discern The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all; So to address our Spirits to the height, And so to attune them to the valiant whole, That the great light be clearer for our light, And the great soul the stronger for our soul: To have done this is to have lived, though fame Remembers us with no familiar name. Certainly these sonnets breath a higher spiritual air than do the finest sonnets of Roberts, as, for instance, _The Sower_ and _The Potato Harvest_. As certainly, in sustained serenity and moral import, as well as in profound spiritual beauty, Lampman’s sonnet-sequence _The Frogs_ surpasses Roberts’ sonnet-sequence in his _Songs of the Common Day_,—not only technically and in nature-color and music but also in transporting the spirit with inevitable ‘murmurs and glimpses of eternity’:—