And the following are powerfully and painfully expressive:

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame,

Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,

Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
Oh, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose!

O, what a mansion have those vices got,

Which for their habitation chose out thee,
Where Beauty's veil doth cover every blot,

And all things turn to fair that eyes can see!

"Who taught thee," he says in another Sonnet,

to make me love thee more

The more I hear, and see just cause for hate?

He who wrote these and similar passages was certainly under the full and irresistible influence of female fascination. But who it was that thus ruled the universal heart and mighty spirit of our Shakspeare, we know not. She stands behind him a veiled and a nameless phantom. Neither dare we call in Fancy to penetrate that veil; for who would presume to trace even the faintest outline of such a being as Shakspeare could have loved?

I think it doubtful to whom were addressed those exquisite lines,

Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now! &c.*

but probably to this very person.

* Sonnet 172.

The Sonnets in which he alludes to his profession as an actor; where he speaks of the brand," which vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow," and of having made himself "a motley to men's view," undoubtedly addressed to Lord Southampton.

O, for my sake, do you with Fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide,

"* are

Than public means, which public manners breeds;
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdu'd
To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.
Pity me then, and wish I were renew'd.

The last I shall remark, perhaps the finest of all, and breathing the very soul of profound tenderness and melancholy feeling, must, I think, have been addressed to a female.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile earth, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if (I say) you look upon this verse,

When I perhaps compounded am with clay
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse:

But let your love ev'n with my life decay:
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

* Sonnets 110, 111.

The period assigned to the composition of these Sonnets, and the attachment which inspired them, is the time when Shakspeare was living a wild and irregular life, between the court and the theatre, after his flight from Stratford. He had previously married, at the age of seventeen, Judith Hathaway, who was eight or ten years older than himself: he returned to his native town, after having sounded all depths of life, of nature, of passion, and ended his days as the respected father of a family, in calm, unostentatious privacy.

One thing I will confess :-It is natural to feel an intense and insatiable curiosity relative to great men, a curiosity and interest for which nothing can be too minute, too personal.—And yet when I had ransacked all that had ever been written, discovered, or surmised, relative to Shakspeare's private life, for the purpose of throwing some light upon his Sonnets, I felt no gratification, no thankfulness to those whose industry had raked up the very few particulars which can be known. It is too much, and it is not enough: it disappoints us in one point of view-it is superfluous in another: what need to surround with common-place, trivial associations, registers of wills and genealogies, and I know not what, the mighty spirit who in dying left behind him not merely a name and fame, but a perpetual being, a presence and a power, identified with our nature, diffused through all time, and ruling the heart and the fancy with an uncontrollable and universal sway!

I rejoice that the name of no one woman is popularly identified with that of Shakspeare. He belongs to us all!-the creator of Desdemona, and Juliet, and Ophelia, and Imogen, and Viola, and Constance, and Cornelia, and Rosalind, and Portia, was not the poet of one woman, but the POET OF WOMANKIND.

CHAPTER XVI.

SYDNEY'S STELLA.

Ar the very name of Sir Philip Sydney,-the generous, gallant, all-accomplished Sydney, the roused fancy wakes, as at the sound of a silver trumpet, to all the gay and splendid associations of chivalry and romance. He was in the court of Elizabeth, what Surrey had been in that of her father, Henry the Eighth; and like his prototype, Sir Calidore in the Fairy Queen,—

Every look and word that he did say

Was like enchantment, that through both the ears
And both the eyes, did steal the heart away.

And as Surrey had his Fair Geraldine, Sydney had his Stella.

Simplicity was not the fashion of Elizabeth's age

in any particular; the conversation and the poetry addressed by her stately romantic courtiers to her and her maids of honor, were like the dresses they wore,-stiff with jewels and standing on end with embroidery, gorgeous of hue and fantastic in form; but with many a brilliant gem of exceeding price, scattered up and down, where one would scarce think to find them; losing something of their effect by being misplaced, but none of their inherent beauty and value. The poetry of Sir Philip Sydney was extravagantly admired in his own time, and it has since been less read than it deserves. It contains much of the pedantic quaintness, the labored ornament, the cumbrous phraseology, which was the taste, the language of the day but he had elegance of mind and tenderness of feeling; above all, he was in earnest, and accordingly, there are beautiful and brilliant things scattered through both his poetry and prose. If his "Phoenix-Stella" be less popularly celebrated than the Fair Geraldine, her name less intimate with our fancy, it is not because her poet lacked skill to immortalize her in superlatives: it is the recollection of the mournful fate and darkened fame of that beautiful but ill-starred woman, contrasted with the brilliant career and spotless glory of her lover, which strikes the imagination with a painful contrast, and makes us reluctant to dwell on her memory.

The Stella of Sydney's poetry, and the Philoclea of his Arcadia, was the Lady Penelope DeveWhile reux, the elder sister of the favorite Essex.