embers on the ashes of his youth, that he is in early manhood-his youth just passed-in weakly health, and likely soon to die; divide life into three stages — youth, manhood, and old age; youth might extend to the twenty-fifth year, manhood to the fiftieth, and old age might claim the rest; he cannot, then, be regarded as older than æt. 32, since he is only kept alive by some youthful blood still flowing in his veins; and he is, under the circumstances, fully justified in depicting himself as in the twilight of his day, his sun set fast sinking into night; for had he shortly afterwards died, he would have uttered not only a poetical, but a literal truth.

"In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,"
"In me thou seest the twilight of such day."

But he does not say,—

"That time of year thou dost' but thou may'st."

He does not assert, that he actually is in the autumn of his life, but that he looks so. These sonnets, therefore, prove, that the poet is really a young man, but looking old for his years; in the 87th and 88th, in good health and spirits; but in the 95th, despondent, in bad health, anticipating an early death.

I therefore believe, that the sonnets extend over the period from 1591 to the spring of 1596 at latest, when the Earl went to Spain in his twenty-third year, and Shakspere was just æt. 32.

Having thus settled the date of the sonnets, we may now examine, how far the first 1261 form a

1 Edition 1609.

continuous poem, or are more or less connected together.

From the 1st to the 14th stanza, the poet urges his friend, under various images, to marry and transmit a copy of his beautiful face to posterity; or else, "I prognosticate, thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date." In the 15th he says, "I engraft you new," the first gentle whisper of "my immortal lines." In the 16th, "But wherefore do not you, &c., than in my barren rhyme," still very gentle. In the 17th the breeze rises, "Who will believe," &c. In the 18th, "Shall I compare," &c.

"So long as man can breathe or eye can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

Nothing more about marriage and a son. In the 19th his enthusiasm carries him away, "Devouring Time, blunt thou," &c.; "My love shall in my verse ever live young"; "and I should like to know how his love was to live for ever young, unless he described him; so, in the 20th, the poet gives us the unrivalled description of his love.

Thus, these seven last stanzas, of which I have merely pointed out the connecting links, form a masterpiece of poetic art, worked up with consummate skill, a labour of love.

Twenty years afterwards the same hand wrote, and the same heart poured forth the following burst of feeling:

"Ant.-O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers !

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,-

Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,—

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

Domestic fury, and fierce civil strife,
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy:
Blood and destruction shall be so in use,
And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity chok'd with custom of fell deeds:
And Cæsar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Até by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch's voice,
Cry 'Havock,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men groaning for burial."

Julius Cæsar, act iii. sc. 1.

Probably, some writers may say, these lines are not consecutive, but merely continuous, being held together by a "leading idea," and wound up to the climax of a hyperbolical passion; certainly they do not appear to me to be so consecutive, so dependent one upon the other, as the seven sonnets, which, rising in successive order one above the other, resemble the marble steps ascending to a Grecian temple, the 20th the god within.

From this point, the reader, affected by the exquisite pathos of various passages, wanders uncertain on through confused and unconnected stanzas, till, like the bursting out of sunshine, or the memory of young and happy days, suddenly strike on his delighted

a

senses the Sonnets 53, '4, '5; no doubt has he, that these belong to the beautiful poem, from which they are so far removed, like three magnificent bowlders, rent asunder from their native mountain, and borne far away by an antediluvian ice-river.

In the 53rd, the poet again describes, with a prelude from the world of shadows an ideal beauty, being the union or absorption of the feminine into the masculine perfections; the 55th is an imitation of the exegi monumentum of Horace, and is, no doubt, the last stanza of the poem; the first part of which consists of twenty stanzas, and in the second part the lost sonnets probably amount to seven or seventeen ; and as in the 53rd and 54th the poet praises his friend for his constancy and truth, the two great virtues of chivalry, it is possible, the missing sonnets may refer to the virtues and career of a gentle knight; and I may further add, how unmeaning and unintelligible in their present position are the four lines about shadows in the 53rd; but how natural and full of meaning, if we view them as having a reference to previous sonnets, describing the knightly virtues and accomplishments of his friend.

Amongst all the sonnets there is not one that can be interposed between the 20th and 53rd, except a sonnet in the Passionate Pilgrim, having a reference to Spenser, and which, "unquestionably, bears the mark of Shakspere's hand"; I have, therefore, placed it between the 20th and 53rd, as the representative of 1 Ed. 1609; but in this Ed. 22, 23, 24.

the missing sonnets. As the 143rd and 151st were also published in the Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, it will be seen, I have not committed such an impropriety, nor taken so great a liberty, as might at first have been imagined; but in restoring this sonnet to its place, have only done an act of justice and benevolence. Furthermore, in the last line it confirms and ratifies my opinion, that the missing sonnets refer to the virtues and career of a gentle knight; it also corroborates the supposition, that the sonnets were commenced in 1591, at which time Dowland was the fashionable musician, and Spenser, who was in England in 1590-1, had just published in the Tears of the Muses,

'He, the man whom Nature self had made
To mock herself, and Truth to imitate,
With kindly counter, under mimic shade,
Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late."

Here ends the First Part of the Sonnets, a Poem, essentially a work of art.

The Second and Third Parts consist of "poetical epistles," or at least, of their lamentable remains; it is the man that speaks, sometimes showing his wit and ingenuity, occasionally glimpses of his innermost feelings; but not unfrequently the poet breaks forth, gilding or glooming the scene. In the arrangement of these epistles, I have been guided by the death of Marlowe, and the publication of the poems, but more especially, as far as my judgment goes, by their versification and tone, and by their internal contents.