The Berkeleyan, Vol. 23

Excerpt from The Berkeleyan, Vol. 23: Une, 1887 A memorial, more noble than the few sonnets of Richard Henry Wilde, shall be his discovery of Giotto's portrait on the walls of the Bargello. He is at his best in the sonnet To Lord Byron, quite regular in form, and remarkable for its perfect double rhymes. With most of our poets whose efforts in lines of narrative, imaginative, or didactic verse have been crowned with success, the sonnet has been a diversion rather than a serious study. Of such are: Josiah Gilbert Holland, whose Two Homes, published a year before his death, is worthy of mention. James Gates Percival, who himself says that his verse does not bear the marks of the file and burnisher, that he likes to see poetry in the full ebullition of fancy and feeling, foaming up with the spirit of life, and glowing with the rainbows of a glad inspiration, - a remark embodying the very criticism to which his sonnets are open. His most pleasing son net is If on the clustering curls of thy dark hair. Thomas Buchanan Read, whose Indian Summer isa good specimen of word-painting. William W. Story, whose Be of good cheer ye firm and dauntless few, is probably an apostrophe to Garrison, Phillips, and their fellow workers in the cause of abolition. Henry Theodore Tuckerman, whose Love Sonnets are pleasing enough to disarm criticism. Nathaniel Parker Willis, whose I care not that the world when I am dead is only remarkable from the fact that a young man in the glory of graduation from college troubled his mind on such a subject. Edgar Allen Poe, whose iconoclastic Rationale of Verse shows his familiarity with the principles and technique of the poetic art, has failed in his few sonnets of anything worthy a place in an anthology - except it be one of Eccentricities of Poetry. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.