These sonnets are in Petrarch's earlier manner; but the death of Laura brought a change. Look at yonder schooner coming down the bay, straight toward us; she is hauled close to the wind, her jib is white in the sunlight, her larger sails are touched with the same snowy lustre, and all the swelling canvas is rounded into such lines of beauty as nothing else in the world--not even the perfect outlines of the human form--can give. Now she comes up into the wind, and goes about with a strong flapping of the sails, which smites our ears at a half-mile's distance; and she then glides off on the other tack, showing us the shadowed side of her sails, until she reaches the distant zone of haze. So change the sonnets after Laura's death, growing shadowy as they recede, until the very last seems to merge itself in the blue distance. SONNET 251. "_Gli occhi di ch' io parlai._" Those eyes, 'neath which my passionate rapture rose, The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile Could my own soul from its own self beguile, And in a separate world of dreams enclose, The hair's bright tresses, full of golden glows, And the soft lightning of the angelic smile Which changed this earth to some celestial isle, Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows. And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, Left dark without the light I loved in vain, Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn; Dead is the source of all my amorous strain, Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain. "And yet I live!" What immeasurable distances of time and thought are implied in the self-recovery of those words. Shakespeare might have taken from them his "Since Cleopatra died,"--the only passage in literature which has in it the same wide spaces of emotion. There is a vastness of transition in each, which, if recited by Fanny Kemble, would take one's breath away. The next sonnet seems to me the most stately and concentrated of the whole volume. It is the sublimity of all hopelessness, destined to deliverance, but unable to foresee it. SONNET 253. "_Soleasi nel mio cor._" She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home, And now her time for heavenly bliss has come, 'Tis I am mortal proved, and she divine. The soul that all its blessings must resign, And love whose light no more on earth finds room Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom, Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine; They weep within my heart; and ears are deaf Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care, And naught remains to me save mournful breath. Assuredly but dust and shade we are, Assuredly desire is blind and brief, Assuredly its hope but ends in death. In the next he has risen to that dream which is more than earth's realities. Sonnet 261 "_Levommi il mio pensiero._"