I had admired Coleridge’s sonnet on Schiller’s _Robbers_ for the perhaps minor excellence of bringing vividly before the mind the scenes it describes. If the sonnet is unconscionably bad so perhaps is the play, the beautiful scene of the setting sun notwithstanding. Eventually, however, I abandoned my belligerent position as to Milton’s sonnets: the army of authorities I found ranged against the modest earth-works within which I had entrenched myself must of itself have made me quail. My utmost contention had been that Milton wrote the most impassioned sonnet (_Avenge, O Lord_), the two most nobly pathetic sonnets (_When I consider_ and _Methought I saw_), and one of the poorest sonnets (_Harry, whose tuneful_, etc.) in English poetry. At this time (September 1880) Mr. J. Ashcroft Noble published an essay on _The Sonnet in England_ in _The Contemporary Review_, and relating thereto Rossetti wrote: I have just been reading Mr. Noble’s article on the sonnet. As regards my own share in it, I can only say that it greets me with a gratifying ray of generous recognition. It is all the more pleasant to me as finding a place in the very Review which years ago opened its pages to a pseudonymous attack on my poems and on myself. I see a passage in the article which seems meant to indicate the want of such a work on the sonnet as you are wishing to supply. I only trust that you may do so, and that Mr. Noble may find a field for continued poetic criticism. I am very proud to think that, after my small and solitary book has been a good many years published and several years out of print, it yet meets with such ardent upholding by young and sincere men. With the verdicts given throughout the article, I generally sympathise, but not with the unqualified homage to Wordsworth. A reticence almost invariably present is fatal in my eyes to the highest pretensions on behalf of his sonnets. Reticence is but a poor sort of muse, nor is tentativeness (so often to be traced in his work) a good accompaniment in music. Take the sonnet on _Toussaint L’Ouverture_ (in my opinion his noblest, and very noble indeed) and study (from Main’s note) the lame and fumbling changes made in various editions of the early lines, which remain lame in the end. Far worse than this, study the relation of the closing lines of his famous sonnet _The World is too much with us_, etc., to a passage in Spenser, and say whether plagiarism was ever more impudent or manifest (again I derive from Main’s excellent exposition of the point), and then consider whether a bard was likely to do this once and yet not to do it often. Primary vital impulse was surely not fully developed in his muse.