bitterness of death may soon be past (xc.). 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 (XCI.); 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 (XCII.); so his friend, fair in seeming, false within, would be like Eve's apple (XCIII.); it is to such self-contained, passionless persons that nature entrusts her rarest gifts of grace and beauty; yet vicious self-indulgence will spoil the fairest human soul (XCIV.). So let Will beware of his youthful vices, already whispered by the lips of men (xcv.); true, he makes graces out of faults, yet this should be kept within bounds (XCVI.). Here again, perhaps, is a gap of time.1 Sonnets XCVII.-XCIX. 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 XCIX. allusion is made to Will's vices, the canker in the rose. After this followed a period of silence. In c. love begins to renew itself, and song awakes. Shakspere excuses his silence (CI.); his love has grown while he was silent (CII.); his friend's loveliness is better than all song (CIII.); three years have passed since first acquaintance; Will looks as young as ever, yet time must insensibly be altering his beauty (CIV.). Shakspere sings with a monotony of love (cv.). All former singers praising knights and ladies only prophesied concerning Will

The last two lines of XCVI.-not very appropriate, I think, in that sonnet-are identical with the last two lines of XXXVI. 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 xcvi. with a couplet from an earlier sonnet.

(CVI.); grief and fear are past; the two friends are reconciled again; and both live for ever united in Shakspere's verse (CVII.). Love has conquered time and age, which destroy mere beauty of face (CVIII.). Shakspere confesses his errors, but now he has returned to his home of love (CIX.), he will never wander again (cx.); and his past faults were caused by his temptations as a player (CXI.); he cares for no blame and no praise now except those of his friend (CXII.). Once more he is absent from his friend (Fourth Absence ?), but full of loving thought of him (CXIII., CXIV.). Love has grown, and will grow yet more (cxv.). Love is unconquered by Time (CXVI.). Shakspere confesses again his wanderings from his friend; they were tests of Will's constancy (CXVII.); and they quickened his own appetite for genuine love (CXVIII.). Ruined love rebuilt is stronger than at first. (CXIX.); there were wrongs on both sides, and must now be mutual forgiveness (CXX.). Shakspere is not to be judged by the report of malicious censors (CXXI.); he has given away his friend's present of a table-book, because he needed no remembrancer (CXXII.); records and registers of time are false; only a lover's memory is to be wholly trusted, recognizing old things in what seem new (CXXIII.); Shakspere's love is not based on self-interest, and therefore is uninfluenced by fortune (CXXIV.); nor is it founded on external beauty of form or face, but is simple love for love's sake (CXXV.). Will is still young and fair, yet he should remember that the end must come at last (CXXVI.).

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

D

I find it possible to go on without interruption from I. to XXXII.; from XXXIII. to XLII.; from XLIII. to LXXIV.; from LXXV. to XCVI.; from XCVII. to XCIX.; from c. to cxxvI.1

I do not here attempt to trace a continuous sequence in the Sonnets addressed to the dark-haired woman (CXXVII.CLIV.); I doubt whether such continuous sequence is to be found in them; but in the Notes some points of connection between sonnet and sonnet are pointed out.

66

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 recognise 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 devótion 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 for ever stands upon the edge of utmost danger, and yet for ever 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

1 Perhaps there is a break at LVIII. 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.

d

Melaphor

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.

I thank Professor Atkinson for help given in reading the proof-sheets of my Introduction; Mr. W. J. Craig, for illustrations of obsolete words; Mr. Furnivall, for hints given from time to time in our discussion by letter of the grouping of the Sonnets; Mr. Edmund Gosse and Dr. Grosart, for the loan of valuable books; Mr. HalliwellPhillipps, for a note on the date of Lintott's reprint; Prof. Hales and Mr. Hart, for several ingenious suggestions; and Mr. L. C. Purser, for translations of the Greek epigrams connected with Sonnets CLIII., CLIV.

PART II.

WHILE reading or glancing through various books, review articles, and scattered fragments of criticism on the Sonnets, I made notes of their contents. These, being now put together, form a history of opinion respecting Shakspere's Sonnets as curious and perhaps as edifying as a history of opinion respecting the Apocalyptic number 666 might be. My notes may at least serve the useful purpose of helping students to avoid certain false guides. But it will be seen that among the writers on the Sonnets are several both learned and judicious.

I do not attempt a Bibliography of the Editions of the Sonnets, for with the materials at my disposal such a bibliography would be far from complete. Nor do my notes give a view of the entire critical literature of the subject. Still, they do not omit a great deal, and I fear they are amply sufficient to exhaust the patience of a well-disposed reader who should try to make his way straight through them, and not use them (as I have hoped that they may be used) rather for the purpose of reference.1

1 Mr. Swinburne, in his "full and heightened style," writes: "Upon the Sonnets such a preposterous pyramid of presumptuous commentary has long since been reared by the Cimmerian speculation and Boeotian 'brain-sweat' of Sciolists and Scholiasts, that no modest man will hope, and no wise man will desire, to add to the structure or subtract from it one single brick of proof or disproof, theorem or theory."