in which there is nothing human. Doña Sol's costume is white, the emblem of innocence and immaculate purity. She is inspired with lofty aspirations and has a longing desire for immortality.

Like Juliet, with whom she has much in common, Doña Sol is an eminently practical woman. She asks Hernani not to blame her strange audacity in proposing to follow him to the mountains, for where he goes she will go. She plans the clandestine meeting and the flight. Frustrated in her first plan, she again proposes flight. She insists on following him even to the scaffold. When confronted by Carlos, who is trying to drag her off, she snatches his dagger and threatens to kill him if he advances one step towards her. Although this is excellent storm-and-stress or melodramatic realism, yet we feel that she is made of heroic stuff. In the climax where she surrenders herself to Carlos rather than allow him to take the head of either Gomez or Hernani, she compels the wonder-struck king to exclaim that a man, in touching Doña Sol, becomes either an angel or a monster. While it is true she goes away with the young king as his hostage, at the same time she does not forget to carry her dagger concealed in her bosom. Finally, in the last balcony-scene she rises to the occasion, pleads earnestly for the life of her lover, yields to the inevitable, and dies bravely by the side of her lion of the mountains.

At the same time Doña Sol's practical turn of mind does not prevent her from being spiritual and poetical. She has longings of the "blue-flower" type. After the fashion of the Romantic characters of the time, she possesses a feeling for nature. This characteristic betrays the artifice of the author who is nothing if not lyrical, and yet there is evident in all his splendid lyrical passages a touch of the nature and realism of contemporary life. The best illustration of Doña Sol's appreciation of nature is found in the last balcony-scene where she and Hernani are alone after the noise of the wedding festivities has subsided. She is supremely happy and is weeping for joy. She asks Hernani to come and see the beautiful night. "While we sleep," says the enraptured woman, "nature half-waking lovingly watches over us. There is not a cloud in the sky. All like ourselves is at rest. Come, breath with me the air perfumed by the rose. No more

lights, no more noise. Silence reigns everywhere. Even while you were speaking just now the moon rose upon the horizon, its glimmering light and your voice both went to my heart." Presently, when the silence becomes too ominous and profound, she asks her lover if he would not like to see some star in the distance or hear some tender and sweet voice sing. She herself would hear the song of some bird in the fields or of a nightingale lost in the darkness, or the sound of some flute in the distance. "For music is sweet, it fills the soul with harmony, and like a divine chorus, it awakens a thousand voices which make melody in the heart." When suddenly she hears the fatal blast of Hernani's horn, she exclaims that her prayer is heard, and tells him how she likes to hear the sound of the horn in the depth of the woods. Another example of this enchanting poetry, whose melodious notes we can never forget, is found in the catastrophe, where Doña Sol, dying of poison, tenderly pleads with Hernani to be calm, for "We are going presently to expand our wings together towards new and brighter lights. With an even flight we are setting sail towards a better world."

While the other important characters of the drama are possessed of several passions, the sole passion of Doña Sol is love, her most striking and beautiful characteristic. It is genuine Romantic love, based on instinct. It is love that hopeth all things and enduureth all things. Though Hernani is distrustful, jealous, and scornful, yet her love is strong enough to endure it all. It disdains all social barriers and makes her prefer the disinherited exile and wandering bandit to the powerful lord or emperor. Love is her sole existence. Aimer, c'est vivre, c'est agir. She loved Hernani out of pity, out of admiration, "for the dangers he had passed," for the mystery of his destiny, because she cannot help loving him, and yet, unlike Chimène, she does not know why she loves; she does not know

Where is fancy bred,

Or in the heart or in the head.

Nor does she know why she must follow her lover: "Are you my demon or my angel? I do not Go where you will, I will go.

know, but I am your slave, listen. Remain or depart, I am yours.

Why do I thus? I do not know." Doña Sol believes that her soul is bound to Hernani forever, and she looks upon him as a sort of god. Her love, exalted by spiritualism, and devoid of anything sensual, purifies her soul and brings happiness. Without Hernani, life would mean nothing to her, would be empty, hopeless. With him, she entertains lofty aspirations and sweet longings for immortality. For them, as for Romeo and Juliet, love is the arbiter of life and death. Together, full of love and hope and sensible of a moral victory, they spread their wings to a new and brighter world. Thus our heroine dies, a martyr to love.

The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

JAMES D. BRUNER.

FOREIGN INFLUENCE ON SHAKESPEARE'S

SONNETS

"It may be reckoned as the progress of the twentieth century beyond the nineteenth, that it begins with a general confession of the futility of that criticism what has too long been exercised upon the sonnets of Shakespeare." With these words our lamented Professor Price opens his essay on the "Technic of Shakespeare's Sonnets!" "The gain is likely to be great," he goes on to say, "For, so soon as the world ceases to seek in the sonnets for morbid details of the poet's biography, and for the revelation of his adventures and intrigues, those poems assume their true value as works of art."

Legitimate criticism hereafter will have to regard them as such, and one task which the critic of the sonnets will have to undertake — perhaps not the most charming one, yet an interesting one nevertheless, and a necessary one is the study of their sources, of their relations to previous similar works. For Shakespeare's sonnets were not an isolated phenomenon, any more than his plays and any more than any other works of art. As a matter of fact, the magnitude of the sonnetteering vogue in Europe in the sixteenth century is simply startling.

When Charles VIII entered Rome in 1494 - immediately after the reign of Lorenzo di Medici, glorious in the annals of art and literature- he inaugurated a long series of expeditions which revealed to France the literary and artistic treasures of Italy. The most popular poet of the peninsula was Petrarch, and several causes presently operated to make him the literary idol of Europe.

In 1521, upon the death of Leo X, the Florentine academicians were compelled for political reasons to seclude themselves. Having nothing better to do, they decided to devote their time to the study of Petrarch. A word or a line became a topic for endless commentary and disquisition. Thus the subtle conceits of the poet were made prominent and probably multiplied, and Petrarchism became a fashion. There was upon the throne of

France at this time, a monarch, Francis I, whose heart's desire was to re-establish the age of chivalry, with its glitter, its troubadours, its courts of love. His court became the haunt of idle lords who vied with each other in writing complimentary verses to the idle ladies. Now, inasmuch as idle lords are not especially gifted with fecundity of ideas, they would not of course be at all backward in availing themselves of the storehouse of conceits afforded by Petrarch and the Petrarchists. Indeed, these latter day troubadours could hardly have gone to a more appropriate source for material suited to their purpose. For Petrarch's lyric work was after all only the rich fruit of a plant whose main root lay in France, planted there by the troubadours. The French writers therefore went to that fruit as to a birthright, led the stem back to its original soil, where it again took root and was again destined to send off a runner into foreign domain - this time to England.

About the middle of the century, seven French poets, full of Renascence enthusiasm, organized a circle which they called the Brigade a name afterwards changed to Pléiade—and after a rigid study of the classics they came to the conclusion that the salvation of French literature lay in the creation of an adequate literary or, more strictly, poetic language. This they proceeded to effect, and Tuscany, where such an end had already been accomplished, offered a ready model. Petrarch now assumed a more significant prominence than he had in the court of Francis I, for the Pléiade consisted of genuine poets, having as its leaders such great men as Ronsard and Du Bellay.

In 1549, that body issued its famous manifesto, the Deffense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise, written by Du Bellay. In it the author, after declaring the value of classical models, proclaims: Sonne moy ces beaux sonnets, non moins docte que plaisante Invention Italienne. Pour le Sonnet donques tu as Pe

trarque et quelques modernes Italiens.

Petrarch thus became the idol, not only of the Pléiade, but also of the large school of sonnetteers that grew up under its influence. In his preface to L'Olive, a collection of sonnets, Du Bellay expressly admits having imitated Petrarch.

Ronsard speaks of his lady's glory, Qu'un seul tusquan est