the poet, through which his own most intimate. experiences were seen as having a certain relation, binding them, or the poet himself, to the whole, the One-All. Upon this ground the poet does not hesitate to attribute his suffering to what he calls the unkindness of the object addressed; language used, however, only in his transitional state; for the true doctrine of the poet requires him to take all blames and blindness upon himself (Sonnets 36, 149, etc). The personal suffering of the poet finally awakens in him the conviction, that in his "transgression he has brought pain upon the higher spirit. The sense of this awakens compunction, coupled with the regret that he had not sooner been brought to a certain humble salve, which is no other than a true repentance: for this is the only salve for bosoms wounded by transgression. At length the true insight comes, that his own affliction, the consequence of what he calls a trespass," had first liberated the true spirit (seen through repentance), as if it had been confined within what is often called the natural man (or the natural heart); and then the poet perceives that the spirit, thus liberated, is precisely the spirit which must liberate him, or free him from the dominion of an evil life. 66 It would be easy to give the popular name to this spirit, by whose sufferings or stripes we are healed; but we leave this for the faithful student, who, if he touches the true sense of these Sonnets, will have touched the deepest depths of life. We will only remark, on this point, that when the Scripture declares, that whom the Lord loveth he chas teneth, we may understand that it is not every suffering that worketh, certainly not directly, the redemption of man, but that only or chiefly which proceeds from the spirit of righteousness, inducing that hunger and thirst spoken of in the sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." There are some lines in the 61st Sonnet, which may suggest to many readers the true object addressed by the poet. 61. Is it thy spirit [evidently referring to the "household god," the CONSCIENCE], Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee So far from home, into my deeds to pry; To find out shames and idle hours in me, It is impossible that these lines could have been addressed to any mere person. CHAPTER VI. THERE are yet remaining some points to be further explained. We have expressed the opinion that the opening Sonnets, some sixteen or eighteen, or most of them, may be considered as invocations addressed to the higher spirit of the poet-to what may be called the Muse of Life: "Be thou the tenth muse" (says our poet, in Sonnet 38), "ten times more in worth, than those old nine which rymers invocate." But it must be observed that the poet's prayer is, that he himself may be the medium of expression. This is shown in a multitude of passages, more or less directly, scattered throughout the Sonnets. Thus, in the 21st Sonnet, he says: "O let me, true in love, but truly write.” This line is, in some sense, the key-note of his purpose. A large proportion of the Sonnets are addressed indirectly by the poet to himself: for although he conceived the higher spirit, he conceived it as his own better part; hence, whilst he posited, so to say, the dogma of a separation between himself and the higher spirit, as in Sonnets 36 and 39, yet, in these same Sonnets, the poet asserts the unity; and therefore it is in harmony with the poet's own view, to understand him as addressing himself in many of the Sonnets, even when the form of the language might imply a separation; he says, Sonnet 39: What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what is 't but mine own when I praise thee? And, again, in the 62d Sonnet, his language is: "T is thee (myself) that for myself I praise. The Sonnets, indeed, are transparent with this idea; and if the reader will but once seize the idea of the unity as it lived in the poet, he will regard the Sonnets as a series of monologues, in which the poet now addresses the higher spirit, yet as his own better part, and then addresses himself in what we may call a more human sense, especially in the opening Sonnets, as if urging himself to do his part-to make his own proper effort-at "compiling" verses, to the honor of love. It should be kept in mind that it is a poet that writes, and in the earlier Sonnets we may see him in the act of asking that inspiration of the spirit which is necessary to secure a perpetuity for his verses. The 1st Sonnet is addressed to what the poet calls Beauty's Rose. This is a figurative expression for man, seen in his essential nature, and not simply in his material and phenomenal structure. Man is the Rose of Nature, seen in her beauty. He is the crowning beauty of nature, and is hence figuratively called Beauty's Rose. He is the subject of the 19th Sonnet, where we see that "devouring Time" is forbid, as a most heinous crime, from carving the fair brow of the Rose with her hours, and commanded to draw no lines there with his antique pen; adding, Him in thy course untainted do allow, For beauty's pattern to succeeding men." 66 This is what the poet saw in the tales of chivalry, as referred to in the 106th Sonnet, and what he was prospectively anxious about in the 32d Sonnet. This was what he saw as extant in his own day, in the 83d Sonnet; and as an "example," or exemplar, in the 84th Sonnet, precisely in the sense of the 19th Sonnet, as beauty's pattern, to wit, man, as seen in |