we say, "Shakespearian" pattern.

Each sonnet must be complete; and, even if one of a sequence, it should
contain within itself everything necessary to the understanding of it.
It must be the expression of _one_ emotion, _one_ fact, _one_ idea, and
"the continuity of the thought, idea, or emotion must be unbroken
throughout." "Dignity and repose," "expression ample yet reticent," are
qualities which one of our ablest modern critics emphasises as
essential, and the end must always be more impressive than the
beginning,--the reader must be carried onwards and upwards, and left
with a definite feeling that in what has been said there is neither
superfluity nor omission, but rather a completeness which precludes all
wish or need for a longer poem.

How difficult this is for the poet can only be realised by trying to
achieve it.

The earliest writers of English sonnets were two very romantic and
gallant men of action, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and Henry Howard, Earl of
Surrey,--both destined to brief brilliant lives and tragic deaths. They
were followed by Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and a host of Elizabethan
poets, courtly and otherwise. But it is Shakespeare whose Sonnets
(though not conforming to the Petrarchan model) show the most force and
fire of any in our language until those of Milton.

To analyse the variations of the Shakesperian, Spenserian and Miltonian
forms is, however, unnecessary to our present purpose, as the Sonnet
Sequence we are now prefacing is based on the Petrarchan model. Strictly
speaking, the Petrarchan sestet (the last six lines) should have three
separate rhymed sounds; the first and fourth lines, the second and