Out of this valley of sadness the spirit rises on bolder wing, as the melancholy mood passes away,-- “Hearts of eternity, hearts of the deep! Proclaim from land to sea your mighty fate; How that for you no living comes too late, How ye cannot in Theban labyrinth creep, How ye great harvests from small surface reap, Shout, excellent band, in grand primeval strain, Like midnight winds that foam along the main,-- And do all things rather than pause to weep. A human heart knows naught of littleness, Suspects no man, compares with no one’s ways, Hath in one hour most glorious length of days, A recompense, a joy, a loveliness; Like eaglet keen, shoots into azure far, And always dwelling nigh is the remotest star.” Here, as Landor said, “is a sonnet, and the sonnet admits not that approach to the prosaic which is allowable in the ballad.” For this reason Mr. Alcott, who began his poetical autobiography, when he was eighty years old, in a ballad measure, has now passed into the majesty of the sonnet, as he has come to those passages of life which will not admit prosaic treatment. Moderately used, and not worked to death, as Wordsworth employed it, the sonnet is a great uplifter of poesy. It calls to the reader, as the early Christian litanies did to the worshipper, _Sursum corda_, Raise your thoughts! The canzonet lets us down again into the pathetic, the humorous, or the fanciful,--though in this volume the canzonet generally betokens sadness. It may easily become an ode, as in the verses on Garfield: indeed the ode may be considered as an extended canzonet, or the canzonet as a brief ode. It is the sonnet that chiefly concerns us now, and that form of the sonnet which deals with love; since the germ of this book was a romance of love, seeking to express itself in the uplifting strain and tender cadence of successive sonnets; which lead us though green pastures and beside the still waters, and then to the shore of the resounding sea,--itself worthy of a sonnet which I have somewhere heard:-- “Ah mournful Sea! Yet to our eyes he wore The placid look of some great god at rest; With azure arms he clasped the embracing shore, While gently heaved the billows of his breast; We scarce his voice could hear, and then it seemed The happy murmur of a lover true, Who, in the sweetness of his sleep, hath dreamed Of kisses falling on his lips like dew. Far off, the blue and gleaming hills above, The Sun looked through his veil of thinnest haze, As coy Diana, blushing at her love, Half hid with her own light her earnest gaze, When on the shady Latmian slope she found Fair-haired Endymion slumbering on the ground.”