CII.

My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandised, whose rich esteeeming
The owner's tongue doth publish every where.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,

As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,

And stops her pipe in growth of riper days. Not that the summer is less pleasant now

Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night, But that wild music burdens every bough,

And sweets grown common lose their dear delight, Therefore, like her, I sometimes hold my tongue, Because I would not dull you with my song.

LXXIII.

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As, after sunset, fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

LXXI.

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 world, with vilest worms to dwell.
you read this line, remember not

Nay, if

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. Oh 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 e'en with my life decay; Lest the wise world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone.

There is more of poetry, imagination, and melancholy, in these verses than sensibility, passion, and depth. Shakspeare loved; but he believed no more in love than he believed in anything else. A woman to him is a bird, a zephyr, a flower, which charms and passes away. Owing to his carelessness or ignorance of fame, and to his profession, which excluded him from good company and kept him aloof from the conditions which he could not attain, he seems to have taken life as a fleeting unoccupied hour, a transient and agreeable leisure.

Poets love liberty and the muse more dearly than their mistresses. The pope offered to ab

solve Petrarch from his vows, in order that he might marry Laura. The bard replied to his holiness's obliging proposition, "I have still too many sonnets to write."

Shakspeare, that great tragic spirit, drew his serious ideas from his scorn of himself and of

the human race. He doubted every thing.

66

Perhaps" is a word which in his lines incessantly recurs. Montaigne, on the other side of the water, repeated: Peut-être. Que sais-je ? Perhaps. What do I know ?"

SHAKSPEARE ONE OF THE FIVE OR SIX GREAT MASTER

SPIRITS.

To conclude: Shakspeare is among the five or six writers who have sufficed for the wants and the food of the mind. These parent geniuses seem to have born and suckled all the others. Homer fertilized antiquity. Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, Aristophanes, Horace, Virgil, were his sons. Dante, in like manner, fathers modern Italy, from Petrarch to Tasso. Rabelais created the literature of France; Montaigne, Lafontaine, Molière descend from him. England owes all to Shakspeare; even to our own days he has lent his language to Byron, his dialogue to Sir Walter Scott.

People often deny the authority of these supreme masters; they rebel against them, enumerate their defects, accuse them of tediousness, prolixity, absurdity, and bad taste, even while robbing them, and decking themselves in their spoils; but they struggle in vain beneath their yoke. Every thing is painted with their colours,

every where they stamp their impress. They invent names and words which have enriched the general vocabulary of nations. Their sayings, their phrases, have become proverbs, their fictitious characters real persons, who have heirs and lineage. They open horizons whence rush forth floods of light; they sow ideas, the germs of a thousand others; they furnish imagination, subjects, styles, to all the arts. Their works are inexhaustible mines, or the very bowels of the human mind.

Such are geniuses of the first class. Their vastness, variety, abundance, and originality cause them to be received alone as laws, exemplars, moulds, types, of the various intellects, as there are five or six races of men, of which the others are but shades or branches. Let us beware of insulting the irregularities into which these powerful beings sometimes fall; let us not imitate the wicked Ham, nor laugh if we find one of them naked and asleep in the shade of the ark now landed on the mountains of Armenia, the sole and solitary navigator of the deep; let us respect the diluvian navigator who recommenced the creation, when the cataracts of heaven had ceased to pour. Pious sons, blessed of our sire, let us modestly cover him with our

mantle !