the first conceit of love there bred, Where time and outward form would show it dead. دو Not that Beauty itself can ever die, for this the poet tells us (Sonnet 18) has an "eternal summer; but that in the progress of ages, owing to the mutability of language, its forms of expression become so antiquated that we may speak of them as dead: and yet it is one of the precious fruits of this study, that the adept is enabled to recognize the traces of the spirit wherever it has appeared in the world. That the opening Sonnets are to be understood as invocations to the higher spirit of Beauty, or of life, may appear, in part, from the 78th Sonnet, where the object, figured as Beauty's Rose in the 1st Sonnet, is thus addressed: 78. So oft have I invoked THEE for my muse, And found such fair assistance in my verse; etc. and the Sonnet concludes with these lines: Yet be most proud of that which I compile, It is plain here, though we shall soon make it more so, that the poet's Sonnets, the verses which he "compiles," are the fruit, the very born of that which, in the 1st Sonnet, is figured as Beauty's Rose; and the reader is expected to see, in the course of the explanation we have undertaken, that this is the Spirit of Beauty, or the Beautiful in the Platonic sense; and this spirit is in perfect harmony with the spirit of nature. Hence we may here, in this 78th Sonnet, have a glimpse of the sense in which Shakespeare may be regarded as himself nature's child. He has often been so called, because he drew his inspiration from nature, this being, as he says, all his art; or, to use his own expression in Hamlet, he, of all men who ever wrote, was enabled "to hold the mirror up to nature." There may be more, but there are certainly two species of poetry; and it is necessary to show that our poet, while he knew that he was in possession of the subordinate form, as the result of education and a certain imitative power, desired to become the medium for the expression of that higher form of poetry which is the direct result of the spirit of life becoming active in the soul, under the power of which the poet becomes impersonal: and here we see one of the peculiar characteristics of Shakespeare, as seen in his dramas; or, rather, one of his characteristics is, that he is not seen at all in his writings as a man, but as life-the very object addressed in the opening Sonnets. The principle here stated, that nature, seen in her spirit as life, is "all the art" of the poet, will appear in several of the Sonnets; but, for the present, it will suffice to point to the 16th, in which the poet seems to beseech the spirit to take a "mightier way to make war upon the bloody tyrant time," than to depend upon what he calls the barren rhyme of his pupil pen,-meaning the results of his mere imitative power-by becoming, itself, his immediate muse or inspiration; adding, To give away yourself keeps yourself still; And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill. This sweet skill is no other than nature's skill; for nature always works divinely and sweetly. We may make it appear otherwise when we undertake, following a blind or perverse will, to work in contravention of the divine laws as expressed in nature. We are now prepared to show more directly how the spirit is regarded by the poet of the Sonnets, for which purpose we appeal first to the 39th Sonnet, in which the object, or Beauty's Rose, is addressed as the better part of the poet himself, meaning undoubtedly the spirit of life,—the poet contemplating himself as having a double nature, which, for convenience, we may for the present define as natural and spiritual. 39 O how thy worth with manners may I sing, When thou art all the better part of me; etc. If this does not appear plain, it may become so by turning to the 74th Sonnet, where we see that the poet speaks of consecrating his own better part to the object addressed, which, we must recollect, is figured as Beauty's Rose; and then he tells us that this better part is his own spirit : 74. My spirit is thine, the better part of me. If the reader will scan these two Sonnets closely, the 39th and the 74th, he will see, as it were, the two spirits, the inner and the outer, regarded by the poet as ONE; and here the reader may discover the principal secret of the Sonnets. This unity is the P "precious one," which the poet tells us in the 22d Sonnet he will be as chary of as a tender nurse of its babe. In its beginning it is a babe, the new birth of genius, and no less the blessed child of faith, or faith itself, the one thing needful, as seen in the field of art; for although the poet is filled with a religious spirit, we must regard him as treating of Art, which, in his age, he tells us, in Sonnet 66, was "tongue-tied by authority; "-and here we may cover a hint of the reasons inducing the poet to use the hermetic form of writing. But there is something which disturbs the poet's vision of the unity, and operates as a separation, between himself and his "better part.". By turning to the 44th Sonnet we shall see, beyond a doubt, that this disturbing element is no other than material nature, called "the dull substance of the flesh." This is that which troubled the poet, and gave occasion for that "sour leisure," which nevertheless gave him "sweet leave to entertain the time with thoughts of love," meaning divine love; and yet, this fleshly obstacle was a great grief to the poet: "Ah!" says he, "thought kills me, that I am not thought." His vision of the spirit was so |