I consider the foregoing, perhaps, the most valuable of Rossetti's letters to me. I cannot remember that we ever afterwards talked over the two last sonnets of Shakspeare; if we did so, the meaning attached to them by him did not fix itself very definitely upon my memory.
In explanation of my alleged dislike of the closing couplet, I may say that a rhymed couplet at the close of a sonnet has an effect upon my ear similar to that produced by the couplets at the ends of some of the acts of Shakspeare's plays, which were in many instances interpolated by the actors to enable them to make emphatic exits.
I must now group together a number of short notes on sonnets:
I think Blanco White's sonnet difficult to overrate in _thought_--probably in this respect unsurpassable, but easy to overrate as regards its workmanship. Of course there is the one fatally disenchanting line:
While fly and leaf and insect stood revealed.
The poverty of vision which could not see at a glance that fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is one more however which I don't know).
I'll copy you overpage a sonnet which I consider a very fine one, but which may be said to be quite unknown. It is by Charles Whitehead, who wrote the very admirable and exceptional novel of _Richard Savage_, published somewhere about 1840.
Even as yon lamp within my vacant room With arduous flame disputes the doubtful night, And can with its involuntary light But lifeless things that near it stand illume; Yet all the while it doth itself consume, And ere the sun hath reached his morning height With courier beams that greet the shepherd's sight, There where its life arose must be its tomb:-- So wastes my life away, perforce confined To common things, a limit to its sphere, It gleams on worthless trifles undesign'd, With fainter ray each hour imprison'd here. Alas to know that the consuming mind Must leave its lamp cold ere the sun appear!
I am sure you will agree with me in admiring _that_. I quote from memory, and am not sure that I have given line 6 quite correctly....
I have just had Blanco White's only other sonnet (_On being called an Old Man at 50_) copied out for you. I do certainly think it ought to go in, though no better than so-so, as you say. But it is just about as good as the former one, but for the leading and splendid thought in the latter. Both are but proseman's diction.