Sonnetteer

The humble Addreſs of your Majeſty’s Poet Laureat, and others your Catholick and Proteſtant diſſenting Rhymers, with the reſt of the Fraternity of Minor Poets, Inferiour Verſifiers and Sonnetteers of Your Majeſty’s Ancient Corporation of Parnaſſus.

A few sonnets he wrote—would he have been Italian had he not done so?—but they are of the dogmatic, self-anatomizing character common to that age, and closely copied by our own sonnetteers of Elizabethan times.

Unless you could say “a poor copy, but all that survives of this previously unrecorded 15th-century sonnetteer”, mostly you gave or threw away the lower ranks.

In fact, the Signora had been a celebrated beauty, and had been once a village belle, then an opera dancer; then a prima donna of the San Carlo; sonnetteered by half the abbati and improvisatori idlers from Vesuvius to the Alps; cicisbeo’d by a cardinal, and, in the opinion of the Marchesa di Friolera, whose income had fallen off rapidly at this crisis, subsidized by an Austrian prince.

A young lover of his daughter, disguised as a menial, undertakes the feat, succeeds, entitles the Colonel to “a many hundred hard dollars;” and having thus whipped and spurred his way to the father’s heart, as he had already sighed and sonnetteered to the young lady’s, all ends in the usual stage-style of happiness—marriage.

I showed all the usual symptoms of the stricken deer—raved, sighed, sonnetteered. I was young then. My attachments are much less volcanic now.

He has just broken out into verse in praise of Frances, and I send you the paper wherein it appears. There is too much scansion in the rhythm, but the thought is good. Frances, never having been sonnetteered in print except by me, says she feels as if . . . . .

For love in love-learned Tuscany was then a roaring wind; it came rhythmically and set the glowing mass beating like the sestett of a sonnet. One lived in numbers in those days; numbers always came. You sonnetteered upon the battle-field, in the pulpit, on the Bench, at the Bar.

There judged, there sonnetteered, and there pined Pier delle Vigne, from whom Dante, brushing by him in the hell-wood of suicides, tore a gnarly limb.

He could appreciate too the Gray of The Long Story as well as Gray of The Bard and The Descent of Odin, amused himself with burlesques and minor erotics after the fashion of Whitehead, criticized by parody, sonnetteered in moderation, subscribed a song to the anti-slavery campaign, and so on.