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The Book of the Sonnet

But woman’s empire, holier, more refined, / Moulds, moves, and sways the fallen yet God-breathed mind.

Sarah Josepha
Hale

The Book of the Sonnet

Edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee

The 530 selections by 136 authors span English and American literature up to the late Nineteenth Century, with an extensive list of women sonneteers.

Bibliographic Record

Introductory Letter

BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS, 1867
NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2012

An Essay on the Cultivation, History, and Varieties of the Species of Poem called the Sonnet

I. On the Desirableness of Cultivating the Sonnet

II. Of the Nature and Properties of the Sonnet, particularly the Sonnet called Legitimate

III. Of Guittone d’ Arezzo, and of the Sonnets of Dante and Petrarca

IV. Of the other Principal Sonnet-Writers of Italy

V. Of Other Legitimate but Obsolete Forms of the Sonnet, particularly the Comic Sonnet

VI. Of English Sonnets, and of the Sonnet Illegitimate, or Quatorzen

American Sonnets and Sonneteers

English Sonnets

Sir Thomas Wyatt.
1503–1542. Brunet and Phyllis

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.
1517–1547. Description of Spring and Summer

Recollections of the Time He Spent in Windsor Castle

Epitaph on His Squire, Thomas Clere

On the Life and Death of Sardanapalus

Sir Philip Sidney.
1554–1586. On His Having Obtained a Prize at a Tournament

Death an Ordinance of Nature, and Therefore Good

Sonnet to the Moon

Sonnet to Sleep

Sir Walter Raleigh.
1554?–1618. On Spenser’s "Faery Queen"

Edmund Spenser.
1552?–1599. To His Sonnets, on Sending Them to His Mistress

To One Who Objected to Pride in His Mistress

Spring Sent to His Mistress Like a Herald

Absence Lamented, Dove-like

William Shakespeare.
1564–1616. The Poet Laments to a Friend His Profession as an Actor

The Consciousness of Being Loved by a Noble Nature a Triumph over All Troubles

To His Lady upon Her Playing on the Virginals

What Singing Birds and Flowers Are in the Absence of the Beloved Person

True Love Not at the Mercy of Time and Circumstance

He Laments That the Countenance of Some Great and Worthy Patron Seems to Be Diverted from Him

Affection Most Loving When It Most Fears to Lose

True Self-Sacrifice of Love

Ben Jonson.
1572–1637. To the King’s Household on Their Withholding His Allowance of Sack

William Drummond, of Hawthornden.
1585–1649. Youth Unexpectedly Smitten by Love

Sense of the Fragility of All Things and of the Unseasonableness of Passion in Love, No Preventive of Love or Poetry

He Mourns the Loss of His Mistress

Recollections of His Lost Bride

To a Bird Singing

The Praise of a Solitary Life

John Milton.
1608–1674. When the Assault Was Intended to the City

On the Detraction Which Followed upon the Writing of Certain Treatises

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

On His Blindness

On the Same

To the Nightingale

Invitation to an Attic Feast

A Dream of His Lost Wife

Thomas Gray.
1716–1771. On the Death of His Friend West

Thomas Warton.
1728–1790. Written on a Blank Leaf of Dugdale’s Monasticon

After Seeing the Collection of Pictures at Wilton House

On Revisiting the River Loddon

Samuel Jackson Pratt.
1749–1814. Revisiting a Birthplace Which Was Not Happy

Charlotte Smith.
1749–1806. Poetry and Sorrow

Written at the Close of Spring

On Children at Play

To the Moon

On the Departure of the Nightingale

"Out of Doors While the Hamlet Is Sleeping"

Anna Seward.
1747–1809. Rising Early to Read, on a Winter’s Morning

Consolatory Power of a Love of Nature

No Barrenness in Nature without Beauty

A Stormy November Evening, Gradually Clearing up in a Mountainous Country

Helen Maria Williams.
1761?–1827. To Hope

Mrs. Mary Darby Robinson.
1757?–1800. The Temple of Chastity

Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges.
1762–1837. Echo and Silence

William Lisle Bowles.
1762–1850. Church Bells

A Grave in a Convent

To Time

A Landscape

Winter Evening at Home

Hope

Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
1772–1834. On Leaving School

"With Fielding’s Amelia"

On Seeing a Youth Affectionately Welcomed by a Sister

To Bowles

Thoughts During the Singing of a Beautiful Song

To the Author of "The Robbers"

On the Last Failure of Kosciusko

News of the Birth of a Child

A New-born Child and Its Parent

Farewell to Love

Fancy in Nubibus

To the River Otter

Charles Lamb.
1775–1834. To Miss Kelly, the Actress

Craving for Leisure

In the Album of Edith S——.

Written at Cambridge

Charles Lloyd.
1775–1839. To November

Bernard Barton.
1784–1849. To My Wife

To a Grandmother

William Wordsworth.
1770–1850. Pleasant, Voluntary Prison of the Sonnet

Placid Objects of Contemplation

Wanting Sleep

Landscape Painting

A Light in a Distant Window among Mountains

Personal Talk

Personal Talk (continued)

Personal Talk and Books

Personal Talk (concluded)

"Composed upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1803"

A Parsonage in Oxfordshire

London, 1802

Sonnet: "It is a beauteous evening, calm and free"

To the Planet Venus,—An Evening Star

After Visiting the Field of Waterloo

The Worst Pangs of Sorrow

Death Conquering and Death Conquered

Robert Southey.
1774–1843. To a Lark

The Ship Setting out

The Ship in a Storm

The Ship Returning

Edward Hovell-Thurlow, Lord Thurlow.
1781–1829. Summer

The Harvest Moon

Professor John Wilson.
1785–1854. The Evening Cloud

The Lake in Storm

The Lake in Calm

Nature’s Organ-Music in the Mountains

Charles Mackay.
1814–1889. Angelic Visitants

Love and Beauty

William Sotheby.
1757–1833. The Winter’s Morn

Henry Kirke White.
1785–1806. On Hearing the Sounds of an Æolian Harp

Retirement

Joseph Blanco White.
1775–1841. To Night

George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron.
1788–1824. The Prisoner of Chillon

Heavenly and Earthly Beauty Combined

Percy Bysshe Shelley.
1792–1822. To Wordsworth

Political Greatness

Ozymandias

Sonnet: "Ye hasten to the dead!"

John Keats.
1795–1821. "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer"

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

On Reading "The Flower and the Leaf" of Chaucer

"On Leigh Hunt’s Poem, the ‘Story of Rimini’"

The Lover Left by His Love at Evening

On Fame

To Sleep

To J. H. Reynolds

Answer to a Sonnet Ending Thus

His Last Sonnet

James Henry Leigh Hunt.
1784–1859. Quiet Evenings

To the Grasshopper and the Cricket

To My Wife

To Kosciusko

On a Lock of Milton’s Hair

The Nile

Vincent Leigh Hunt.
1823–1852. The Deformed Child

Laman Blanchard.
1803–1845. Creativeness of a Loving Eye

A Wish for the Unfadingness of the Loving Eye

Hartley Coleridge.
1796–1849. First Words of Adam

A Premature Old Bachelor, He Congratulates a Bridegroom

Mrs. Felicia Dorothea Hemans.
1793–1835. The Lilies of the Field

A Vernal Thought

Flowers

The Twilight Hour

Sabbath Sonnet

Thomas Hood.
1799–1845. Written in a Volume of Shakespeare

To Fancy

To a Sleeping Child (I.)

To a Sleeping Child (II.)

Death

Love

Bryan Waller Procter.
1787–1874. Spring

A Still Place

To Adelaide

To Edith—1845

William Henry Whitworth The Pyramids

Nipped Buds Better Than Later Disappointments

Thomas Doubleday.
1790–1870. The Poet’s Solitude

Life

William Green A Sultry Summer Afternoon

Melody and Harmony

Gentle Greatness Undervalued, till Lost

Charles Strong "My window’s open to the evening sky"

Sunrise at Sea, on a Southern Misty Morning

A Moment of Dread in Modern Pompeii

Lovely Companionship

Richard Chenevix Trench.
1807–1886. Enjoy the Present

To Nicholas, Emperor of Russia

To Silvio Pellico

Sir John Hanmer.
1809–1881. America

Art

Chaucer

The Merchant

Henry Alford.
1810–1871. "Rise, said the Master, come unto the feast"

Arthur Brooke Resignation

Edmund Peel To the River Tees

Zeal without Knowledge

To Winter

Sir Aubrey de Vere.
1788–1846. Time Misspent

Origin of the Soul

The Opening of the Tomb of Charlemagne

Diocletian at Salona

Queen Elizabeth

David Lester Richardson.
1801–1865. To My Twin Boys

Fine Weather at Sea

A Calm after a Gale

Evening at Sea

Henry Ellison.
1811–1880. On the Arrival of the Vessel Announcing the Settlement of Differences with America

Poetry a Daily Bread

By the Sea-shore

Against Pride of Intellect

A Privilege Worth a Hard Earning

A Music Yet Unknown, Remaining to Be Heard on Earth

Egerton Webbe.
1810–1840. To a Fog

Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton.
1809–1885. Happiness

After Revisiting Cambridge after a Long Absence

To Charles Lamb

The Forest

Thomas Wade.
1805–1875. Shelley and Keats, and Their "Reviewer"

Shelley

A Prophecy

Calvus

Thomas James Judkin Special Pleading

"Eureka!"

A Character, Drawn from the Life

Picking and Stealing

George Powell Thomas To Constance, in Absence

The Same Subject

To Fame

The First Railway Train in India

Jumnotree

George James De Wilde The Water-Mill

Wheathamstead

Eydon Hall

On the Arrival of Spring

John Watson Dalby At Berkhamstead

The Subject Continued

A Wayside Adventure

Same Subject Continued

A Sleepless Night

At the Aust Ferry Hotel

A Rencontre at Tytherington

Alfred Tennyson.
1809–1892. The Polish Insurrection

A Soldier-Priest

Sonnet: "O, were I loved as I desire to be"

Charles Tennyson.
1808–1879. The Delights of Intellect Unperturbing

On Seeing a Child Blush on His First View of a Corpse

The Rainbow

The Ringlet

On Startling Some Pigeons

Silkworms and Spiders

Frederick Tennyson.
1807–1898. The Village Benefactress

Her Visits to Her Mother’s Grave

Her Secret Grief

Her Sickness and Recovery

Her Exemption from the Common Aspects of Decay

A Wish for Her During the Remainder of Her Life

Aubrey Thomas de Vere.
1814–1902. Reasons for Being Beloved

Requesting to Be Judged by the Desire, and Not by the Desert

Love Self-Sacrificed

Love Vindicating Its Rejecter

Venice by Day

Venice in the Evening

Independence

Correggio’s Cupolas at Parma

Written While Sailing on the Gulf of Lepanto

Edmund Ollier.
1827–1886. On Wilson’s Picture of Solitude

A Dream

A Vision of Old Babylon

The Subject of Babylon Continued (I.)

The Subject of Babylon Continued (II.)

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah (Sheridan) Norton.
1808–1877. Sonnet: "Like an enfranchised bird, that wildly springs"

To My Books

Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
1806–1861. Expressionless

Tears

Perplexed Music

Futurity with the Departed

The Poet

Hugh Stuart Boyd: His Blindness

Hugh Stuart Boyd: Legacies

Flush or Faunus

"The face of all the world is changed"

"What can I give thee back"

"Can it be right to give what I can give?"

"Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed"

"And therefore, if to love can be desert"

"Indeed this very love which is my boast"

"And wilt thou have me fashion into speech"

David Gray.
1838–1861. To the Mavis

Morphia

Alexander Smith.
1830–1867. Solitary at Christmas, but Not Sad

The Christmas Solitude Varied with the Christmas Streets

Prophetical Self-reflected Words

William Allingham.
1824–1889. One’s Own Mood Reflected in a Day-dream

Autumnal Twilight, with Friends

One’s Own Tombstone

James Dodds.
1813–1874. Craigcrook

John Hunter A Replication of Rhymes

Elia

Autumn Twilight

Day-dawn

John Stuart Blackie.
1809–1895. To James Dodds and John Hunter

Highland Solitude

At Loch Ericht

Ben Muichdhui

The Statue of Albert Dürer at Nürnberg

Weimar

Berlin

Loch Ericht

American Sonnets

Colonel David Humphreys.
1753–1818. The Soul

Addressed to His Royal Highness, the Prince of Brazil

Richard Bingham Davis.
1771–1799. To Music

To the Setting Moon

To Felicia, on Her Return to New York

Robert Treat Paine.
1773–1811. To Belinda

To the Country Girl

To Anna Louisa, on Her Ode to Fancy

Elegiac Sonnet

To Philenia, on a Stanza in Her Address to Myra

Washington Allston.
1779–1843. On a Falling Group, in the Last Judgment of Michael Angelo

On Rembrandt, Occasioned by His Picture of Jacob’s Dream

On Seeing the Picture of Æolus, by Pellegrino Tibaldi

On the Death of Coleridge

On a Statue of an Angel, by Benaimé, of Rome

William Cullen Bryant.
1794–1878. October

Midsummer

November

Consumption

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
1807–1882. Autumn

Dante

The Good Shepherd

The Brook

James Gates Percival.
1795–1856. The Poet

Night

"Winter is now around me"

"The blue heaven spreads before me"

Jones Very.
1813–1880. The Robin

Morning

Thy Beauty Fades

The Spirit-land

George Hill.
1796–1871. Liberty

Spring

Park Benjamin.
1809–1864. Flowers Love’s Truest Language

The Stars

Spring

Twilight

"Is this a painting?"

Snow

Henry Theodore Tuckerman.
1813–1871. Freedom

On a Landscape, by Backhuysen

To Jenny Lind

Desolation

To One Deceived

"O for a castle on a woodland height!"

"The rain-drops patter on the casement still"

"The buds have opened, and in leafy pride"

"What though our dream is broken?"

William Gilmore Simms.
1806–1870. Trophies—How Planted

Where Planted

The Triumph

Glory and Enduring Fame

William Henry Burleigh.
1812–1871. The Brook

Rain

James Dixon.
1814–1873. To a Robin

Rev. Norman Pinney.
1800–1862. "Calm Twilight! in thy wild and stilly time"

"Still unto thee, my brightest, fairest, best"

Hugh Peters.
1807–1831. Ad Poetas

To the Moon

George Henry Boker.
1823–1890. "I do assure thee, love, each kiss of thine"

"I shall be faithful, though the weary years"

The Awaking of the Poetic Faculty

"Love is that orbit of the restless soul"

"Where lags my mistress while the drowsy year"

"No gentle touches of your timid hand"

"I have been mounted on life’s topmost wave"

To the Memory of M. A. R.

To J. M. B.

"No hope is mine, no comfort mine"

"Absence from thee is something worse than death"

To England

James Russell Lowell.
1819–1891. "I ask not for those thoughts, that sudden leap"

To M. W., on Her Birthday

"Beloved! in the noisy city here"

To A. C. L.

Richard Henry Wilde.
1789–1847. To Lord Byron

To the Mocking-bird

John Howard Bryant.
1807–1902. "There is a magic in the moon’s mild ray"

"’T is Autumn, and my steps have led me far"

George Henry Calvert.
1803–1889. On the Fifty-fifth Sonnet of Shakespeare

To the Statue of Eve, by Powers

Nathaniel Parker Willis.
1806–1867. "Storm had been on the hills"

Acrostic Sonnet

William Henry Cuyler Hosmer.
1814–1877. On a Cascade near Wyoming

Night

Epes Sargent.
1813–1880. The Departure

The Awakening

Tropical Weather

Bayard Taylor.
1825–1878. From the North

To G. H. B.

To E. C. S.

To R. H. S.

To J. L. G.

Richard Henry Stoddard.
1825–1903. To Bayard Taylor

To Edmund Clarence Stedman

To James Lorimer Graham, Jr.

Florence Nightingale

Colonel Frederick Taylor

To Jervis McEntee, Artist

Edmund Clarence Stedman.
1833–1908. A Mother’s Picture

Hope Deferred

The Swallow

To B. T.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
1836–1907. Euterpe

Pursuit and Possession

Accomplices

Egypt

Paul Hamilton Hayne.
1830–1886. Ancient Fables

"Pent in this common sphere of sensual shows"

"Now, while the Rear-Guard of the flying Year"

October

Poets of the Olden Time

"O God! what glorious seasons bless thy world!"

"O Faithful heart! on balmy nights like this"

"An hour agone!—and prostrate Nature lay"

"Between the sunken sun, and the new moon"

"Spirits there are inwrought with vilest clay"

Thomas Buchanan Read.
1822–1872. The Master Bards

To Wordsworth

Indian Summer

Beatrice

John R. Thompson.
1823–1873. Sonnets to Winter. I. Old Wine to Drink

John Esten Cooke.
1830–1886. Sonnets to Winter. II. Old Wood to Burn

John R. Thompson.
1823–1873. Sonnets to Winter. III. Old Books to Read

John Esten Cooke.
1830–1886. Sonnets to Winter. IV. Old Friends to Love

Henry Timrod.
1828–1867. "At last, beloved Nature, I have met"

"Fate! seek me out some lake far off and lone"

"Are these wild thoughts thus fettered in my rhymes"

"Mary! I dare not call thy charms divine"

"Which are the clouds, and which the mountains?"

"Were I the Poet Laureate of the Fairies"

William H. Timrod.
1792–1838. An Autumnal Day in Carolina

The May Queen

John Godfrey Saxe.
1816–1887. To a Clam

Bereavement

John R. Tait.
1834–1909. To a Poet, with a Copy of Verses

Written at Vallombrosa

To ———.

"The years, swift waves upon the sea of Time"

Poets

John James Piatt.
1835–1917. Learning Prayers

C. E. Da Ponte A Lover’s Sonnet

H. "Now tripping forth, the fairy-footed Spring"

"Nay, chide me not that I am jealous, love"

"Come, dear one, smile consent!"

"Come, dearest, to my heart"

Jedidiah Vincent Huntington.
1815–1862. On Reading Bryant’s Poem of "The Winds"

George Lunt.
1803–1885. "O friend! whose genial spirit"

A Statesman

Henry Lynden Flash.
1835?–1914. Adele

Albert Laighton.
1829–1887. "Night and its dews come silently to earth"

Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber.
1814–1890. On a Picture of Lillie

Charles Fenno Hoffman.
1806–1884. To an Autumn Rose

Anonymous "O’er the far waters floats the boatman’s song"

Female Sonneteers

Mrs. Elizabeth Oakes Smith.
1806–1893. Expressionless

Regrets

Poesy

Frances Anne Kemble.
1809–1893. To Shakespeare

"What is my lady like?"

To the Nightingale

To Shakespeare

"By jasper founts, whose falling waters make"

"Spirit of all sweet sounds!"

"Whene’er I recollect the happy time"

"Like one who walketh in a plenteous land"

Anne Charlotte Lynch.
1815–1891. On Seeing the Ivory Statue of Christ

"The honey-bee, that wanders all day long"

"Night closes round me, and wild threatening forms"

"As some dark stream within a cavern’s breast"

"The mountain lake, o’ershadowed by the hills"

Mrs. Sarah Josepha Hale.
1788–1879. Woman’s Empire Defined

Mrs. Mary Noel McDonald "Come with thy rose-wreaths, fair and laughing June!"

"I would be with thee on the sunny hills"

"Alas! it may not be"

The First Snow

The Frozen Stream

Winter Twilight

Night

Mrs. Elizabeth Clementine Kinney.
1810–1889. Fading Autumn

A Winter Night

Cultivation

Encouragement

To a Violet Found in December

Mrs. Anna Maria Lowell In Absence

Mrs. Elizabeth Jesup Eames.
1813–1856. Twilight

The Moon

The Star

A Cloud

Mrs. Elizabeth F. Swift To Estelle

"Moonlight upon the hills!"

Mrs. Emma Catharine Embury.
1806–1863. Confidence in Heaven

"He who has travelled through some weary day"

Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman.
1803–1878. Faded Flowers

Mrs. Anna Maria Wells To a Young Mother

Mrs. Elizabeth Fries Ellet.
1818–1877. "Shepherd, with meek brow wreathed with blossoms sweet"

"O weary heart, there is a rest for thee!"

Mrs. Alice Bradley Neal.
1828–1863. Midnight

Daybreak

Tranquilla "If all the world had told me thou wert false"

"I love thee yet!"

Sarah Gould Pauline

The Book of the Sonnet

Edited by Leigh Hunt and S. Adams Lee

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