Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies, use, If thou couldst answer-"This fair child of mine Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse-" Proving his beauty by succession thine! This were to be new-made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.-2. Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest, Now is the time that face should form another; For where is she so fair, whose unear'd womb Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee see, Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time. -3. Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy? Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend, And, being frank, she lends to those are free. Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse The bounteous largess given thee to give? Profitless usurer, why dost thou use So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live? For having traffic with thyself alone, Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive. Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone, What acceptable audit canst thou leave? Thy unus'd beauty must be tomb'd with thee, Which, used, lives thy executor to be.-4. Those hours, that with gentle work did frame The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell, Will play the tyrants to the very same, And that unfair which fairly doth excel; Lo, in the orient when the gracious light Lifts up his burning head, each under eye Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, Serving with looks his sacred majesty: And having climb'd the steep-up heavenly Resembling strong youth in his middle age, Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day, Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadiv Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy, Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st of hill, car, gladly? Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine anor If the true concord of well-tuned sounds, Strikes each in each by mutual ordering; Sings this to thee, "Thou single wilt prove none."-8. Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye, mind. Look, what an unthrift in the world doth spend, Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it: But beauty's waste hath in the world an end, And kept unus'd, the user so destroys it. No love toward others in that bosom sits, That on himself such murderous shame commits.-9. For shame! deny that thou bear'st love to any spire; Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate, mind! Shall hate be fairer lodg'd than gentle love? As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st In one of thine, from that which thou departest; And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st, Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest. Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase; away. Let those whom Nature hath not made for store, Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish: Look, whom she best endow'd, she gave thee more; Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish: She carv'd thee for her seal, and meant thereby Thou shouldst print more, nor let that copy When I do count the clock that tells the time, Then of thy beauty do I question make, And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence, Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.-12. O that you were yourself! but, love, you are No longer yours than you yourself here live : Against this coming end you should prepare, And your sweet semblance to some other give. So should that beauty which you hold in lease Find no determination: then you were Yourself again, after yourself's decease, When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear. Who lets so fair a house fall to decay, O! none but unthrifts :-Dear my love, you You had a father; let your son say so.-13. Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck; Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and When I consider everything that grows Whereon the stars in secret influence com- When I perceive that men as plants increase, Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half If I could write the beauty of your eyes, faces. So should my papers, yellow'd with their age, And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage, But were some child of yours alive that You should live twice;-in it, and in my Shall I compare thee to a summer's day! And summer's lease hath all too short a date: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, brood; Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's And burn the long-liv'd phenix in her blood; wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young -19 That this series of Sonnets, powerful as they are, displaying not only the most abundant variety of imagery, but the greatest felicity in making the whole harmonious, constitutes a poem ambitious only of the honours of a work of Art, is, we think, manifest. If it had been addressed to a real person, no other object could have been proposed than a display of the most brilliant ingenuity. In the next age it would have been called an exquisite "copy of verses." But in the next age, probably-certainly in our own the author would have been pronounced arrogant beyond measure in the anticipation of the immortality of his rhymes. There is a show of modesty, indeed, in the expressions "barren rhyme" and "pupil pen;" but that is speedily cast off, and "eternal summer" is promised through "eternal lines;" and "So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Regarding these nineteen Sonnets as a continuous poem, wound up to the climax of a hyperbolical promise of immortality to the object whom it addresses, we receive the 20th Sonnet as the commencement of another poem in which the same idea is retained. The poet is bound to the youth by ties of strong affection; but nature has called upon the possessor of that beauty "Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth," to cultivate closer ties. This Sonnet, through an utter misconception of the language of Shakspere's time, has produced a comment sufficiently odious to throw an unpleasant shade over much which follows. The idea which it contains is continued in the 53rd Sonnet; and we give the two in connexion : A woman's face, with nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women's fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created; And by addition me of thee defeated, Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.-20. What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you Since every one hath, every one, one's shade, Between the 20th Sonnet and the 53rd occur, as it appears to us, a number of fragments which we have variously classified. and which seem to have no relation to the praises of that "unknown youth" who has been supposed to preside over five-sixths of the entire series of verses. We have little doubt that the "begetter" of the Sonnets was not able to beget, or obtain, all; and that there is a considerable hiatus between the 20th Sonnet and the second hyperbolical close, which he filled up as well as he could, from other "sugared sonnets amongst private friends:" O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly But, for their virtue only is their show, And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, Not marble, not the gilded monuments tents They contrast remarkably with the tone of the 32nd Sonnet, "These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover." Meres has a passage: "As Ovid saith of his works 'Jamque opus exegi quod nec Jovis ira, nec ignis, Nec poterit ferrum, nec edax abolere vetus tas;' and as Horace saith of his, 'Exegi monumentum ære perennius, &c.; so say I severally of Sir Philip Sidney's, Spenser's, Daniel's, Drayton's, Shakespeare's, and Warner's works." What Ovid and Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish Horace said is imitated in the 55th Sonnet. time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, The living record of your memory. Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still Even in the eyes of all posterity You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. Wherever we meet with these magnificent verses are to we But we greatly doubt if what Meres would have said of Shakspere he would have said of himself, except in some assumed character, | to which we have not the key. Ben Jonson, to whom a boastful spirit has with some justice been objected, never said anything so strong of his own writings; and he wrote with too much reliance, in this and other particulars, upon classical examples. But Jonson was not a writer of Sonnets, which, pitched in an artificial key, made this boastful tone a constituent part of the whole performance. The man, who never once speaks, dramas, greatest of his own merits in his drantellect, when he promises of the immortality which the poet's bestow, find them associated put on the imaginary character in which a with that personage, the representative at poet is weaving a fiction out of his supposed once of "Adonis" and of "Helen," who prepersonal relations, did not hesitate to conform himself sents himself to us as the unreal coinage of to the practice of other masters the fancy. In many of the lines which we of the art. Shakspere here adopted the tone have given in the second division of this which Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton had inquiry, the reader will have noticed the adopted. The parallel appears to us very affecting modesty, the humility without remarkable; and we must beg the indulgence abasement, of the great poet comparing himof our readers while we present them a few self with others. Here Shakspere indeed passages from each of these writers, And first of Spenser. His 27th Sonnet of the speaks. For example, take the whole of the if the Sonnet. We should scarcely imagine, will furnish an adequate notion of the poem were continuous, as Mr. Brown believes, that the last stanza of the second portion of it in his classification would conclude with these lines :ï "Not marble, not the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." self-exaltation which appears to belong to this species of poem : proud, "Fair Proud! now tell me, why should fair be |