is no extravagant praise, but simple truth (21). And such a being has exchanged love with Shakspere (22), who must needs be silent with excess of passion (23), cherishing in his heart the image of his friend's beauty (24), but holding still more dear the love from which no unkind fortune can ever separate him (25). Here affairs of his own compel Shakspere to a journey which removes him from Will (26, 27). Sleepless at night, and toiling by day, he thinks of the absent one (27, 28); grieving for his own poor estate (29), and the death of friends, but finding in the one beloved amends for all (30, 31); and so Shakspere commends to his friend his poor verses as a token of affection which may survive if he himself should die (32). At this point the mood changes-—in his absence his friend has been false to friendship (33); now, indeed, Will would let the sunshine. of his favour beam out again, but that will not cure the disgrace; tears and penitence are fitter (34); and for sake of such tears Will shall be forgiven (35), but henceforth their lives must run apart (36); Shakspere, separated from Will, can look on and rejoice in his friend's happiness and honour (37), singing his praise in verse (38), which he could not do if they were so united that to praise his friend were selfpraise (39); separated they must be, and even their loves. be no longer one; Shakspere can now give his love, even her he loved, to the gentle thief; wronged though he is, he will still hold Will dear (40); what is he but a boy whom a woman has beguiled (41)? and for both, for friend and mistress, in the midst of his pain, he will try to feign excuses (42). Here there seems to be a gap of time. The Sonnets begin again in absence, and some students have called this, perhaps rightly, the Second Absence (43 fol.). His friend. continues as dear as ever, but confidence is shaken, and a deep distrust begins to grow (48). What right indeed has a poor player to claim constancy and love (49)? He is on a journey which removes him from Will (50, 51). His

friend perhaps professes unshaken loyalty, for Shakspere now takes heart, and praises Will's truth (53, 54)—takes heart, and believes that his own verse will forever keep that truth in mind. He will endure the pain of absence, and have no jealous thoughts (57, 58); striving to honour his friend in song better than ever man was honoured before (59); in song which shall outlast the revolutions of time (60). Still he cannot quite get rid of jealous fears (61); and yet, what right has one so worn by years and care to claim all a young man's love (62)? Will, too, in his turn must fade, but his beauty will survive in verse (63).. Alas! to think that death will take away the beloved one (64); nothing but verse can defeat time and decay (65). For his own part Shakspere would willingly die, were it not that, dying, he would leave his friend alone in an evil world (66). Why should one so beautiful live to grace this ill world (67) except as a survival of the genuine beauty of the good old times (68); yet beautiful as he is, he is blamed for careless living (69), but surely this must be slander (70). Shakspere here returns to the thought of his own death: when I leave this vile world, he says, let me be forgotten (71, 72); and my death is not very far off (73); but when I die my spirit still lives in my verse (74). A new group seems to begin with 75. Shakspere loves his friend as a miser loves his gold, fearing it may be stolen (fearing a rival poet?). His verse is monotonous and old-fashioned (not like the rival's verse?) (76); so he sends Will his manuscript book unfilled, which Will may fill, if he please, with verse of his own; Shakspere chooses to sing no more of Beauty and of Time; Will's glass and dial may inform him henceforth on these topics (77). The rival poet has now won the first place in Will's esteem (78-86). Shakspere must bid his friend farewell (87). If Will should scorn him, Shakspere will side against himself (88, 89). But if his friend is ever to hate him, let it be at once, that the bitter

ness of death may soon be past (90). He has dared to say farewell, yet his friend's love is all the world to Shakspere, and the fear of losing him is misery (91); but he cannot really lose his friend, for death would come quickly to save him from such grief; and yet Will may be false and Shakspere never know it (92); so his friend, fair in seeming, false within, would be like Eve's apple (93); it is to such self-contained, passionless persons that nature intrusts her rarest gifts of grace and beauty; yet vicious self-indulgence will spoil the fairest human soul (94). So let Will beware of his youthful vices, already whispered by the lips of men (95); true, he makes graces out of faults, yet this should be kept within bounds (96). Here again, perhaps, is a gap of time.* Sonnets 97-99 are written in absence, which some students, perhaps rightly, call Third Absence. These three. sonnets are full of tender affection, but at the close of 99 allusion is made to Will's vices, the canker in the rose. After this followed a period of silence. In 100 love begins to renew itself, and song awakes. Shakspere excuses his silence (101); his love has grown while he was silent (102); his friend's loveliness is better than all song (103); three years have passed since first acquaintance; Will looks as young as ever, yet time must insensibly be altering his beauty (104). Shakspere sings with a monotony of love (105). All former singers praising knights and ladies only prophesied concerning Will (106); grief and fear are past; the two friends are reconciled again; and both live forever united in Shakspere's verse (107). Love has conquered time and age, which destroy mere beauty of face (108). Shakspere confesses his errors, but now he has returned to his home of

*The last two lines of 96—not very appropriate, I think, in that sonnet -are identical with the last two lines of 36. It occurs to me as a possibility that the MS. in Thorpe's hands may here have been imperfect, and that he filled it up so far as to complete 96 with a couplet from an earlier

sonnet.

C

love (109), he will never wander again (110); and his past faults were partly caused by his temptations as a player (111); he cares for no blame and no praise now except those of his friend (112). Once more he is absent from his friend (Fourth Absence?), but full of loving thought of him (113, 114). Love has grown and will grow yet more (115). Love is unconquerable by Time (116). Shakspere confesses again his wanderings from his friend; they were tests of Will's constancy (117); and they quickened his own appetite for genuine love (118). Ruined love rebuilt is stronger than at first (119); there were wrongs on both sides and must now be mutual forgiveness (120). Shakspere is not to be judged by the report of malicious censors (121); he has given away his friend's present of a table-book, because he needed no remembrancer (122); records and registers of time are false; only a lover's memory is to be wholly trusted, recognizing old things in what seem new (123); Shakspere's love is not based on self-interest, and therefore is uninfluenced by fortune (124); nor is it founded on external beauty of form or face, but is simple love for love's sake (125). Will is still young and fair, yet he should remember that the end must come at last (126).

Thus the series of poems addressed to his friend closes gravely with thoughts of love and death. The Sonnets may be divided at pleasure into many smaller groups, but I find it possible to go on without interruption from 1 to 32; from 33 to 42; from 43 to 74; from 75 to 96; from 97 to 99; from 100 to 126.*

I do not here attempt to trace a continuous sequence in the sonnets addressed to the dark-haired woman, 127–154; I doubt whether such continuous sequence is to be found in

* Perhaps there is a break at 58. The most careful studies of the sequence of the Sonnets are Mr. Furnivall's, in his preface to the Leopold Shakspere, and Mr. Spalding's, in The Gentleman's Magazine, March, 1878.

them; but in the Notes some points of connection between sonnet and sonnet are pointed out.

If Shakspere "unlocked his heart" in these Sonnets, what do we learn from them of that great heart? I cannot answer otherwise than in words of my own formerly written. "In the Sonnets we recognize three things: that Shakspere was capable of measureless personal devotion; that he was tenderly sensitive, sensitive above all to every diminution or alteration of that love his heart so eagerly craved; and that, when wronged, although he suffered anguish, he transcended his private injury, and learned to forgive. . . . The errors of his heart originated in his sensitiveness, in his imagination. (not at first inured to the hardness of fidelity to the fact), in his quick consciousness of existence, and in the self-abandoning devotion of his heart. There are some noble lines by Chapman, in which he pictures to himself the life of great energy, enthusiasms, and passions, which forever stands upon the edge of utmost danger, and yet forever remains in absolute security:

'Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Loves to have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship runs on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air;
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is, there's not any law

Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.'

"Such a master-spirit, pressing forward under strained canvas, was Shakspere. If the ship dipped and drank water, she rose again; and at length we behold her within view of her haven, sailing under a large, calm wind, not without tokens of stress of weather, but if battered, yet unbroken by the waves." The last plays of Shakspere, The Tempest, Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Henry VIII., illuminate the Sonnets and justify the moral genius of their writer.