And yet I know English sonnets that are lovely. Milton wrote one. Keats wrote one. Mrs. Browning wrote more than one. George Pellew wrote three, three great ones, on Greek subjects, I seem to remember. To do it he made himself, in spirit, un-English. He slipped upon his shoulder the graceful garment of another race and turned back, for rare creative moments, toward the red, wine-making south. Mrs. Browning did something similar, although she only went as far as Italy. She was prodigiously instructed, however, in both Greek and Latin. The calm spaces between words in Italian sonnet writers is vastly more difficult of realizing than people think. It is harder to sit perfectly still than to stand upon your head at stated intervals, wearing bells and motley. You can not catch Art, (with either a large or a small letter) by running after her and sprinkling salt upon her tail. Genuine Success is something besides a large noise and a yellow electric light. The calm gliding into the first line of an accomplished sonnet writer of old Italy, gives me the same sensation as, after noise, discomfort of a storm, the calm gliding into a harbor, blue, safe, sheltered, smiling, serene. I have felt this strongly in opening lines of Dante’s _Vita Nuova_. They recur to me again and again. _Ballata i voi che tu ritrovi Amore_ Consider the jeweled setting of vowels, their wise interlining, the grace, consider, the beginning, that does not disturb the poise of silence, nor invade harshly its suave secrecy. Or _Tutti li miei penser parlare d’Amore_ _Donne ch’avete intellette d’Amore, i vo’con voi de la mia donna dire._ Italy is almost as rich in dignified, nobly chiseled sonnets as in chiseled marbles. Today we are trying to belittle the sonnet. Frequently we make it tawdry. The sonnet is akin to the eye which is one of the windows of the soul. It is not an up-heaped bargain-counter, for a noisy bargain sale. Heredia, despite his varied story-telling in sonnet form, did not overcrowd the line. He was too reliable an artist. He knew what a frame is silence. Nor did d’Annunzio! Both were too sensitive for this indelicate wrong. Very likely the chief difficulty lies in the fact that the sonnet does not suit the life of the present. New art-form must be invented for our restless, changing existence. The old bottles are not strong enough for the heavy, strange effervescences, from grapes, of this crowded, disconcerting, wild Garden of Time. Goethe expatriated the soul of him astonishingly in that war-vexed Germany that knew the wild ways of Napoleon, when he wrote _The Roman Elegies_. (_Die Römische Elegien._) They are calm. They are chiseled like marbles of Attica. They are sincere, noble, firm, truly visioned; the kind of art we shall not see soon again. They have given me unvarying pleasure throughout the years because of the perfection they keep. Their wholeness is source of strength. I read them over and over.