Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets.djvu/21

Rh may not be at once Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, their answer amounts to this: Is it likely that Shakspere would so have rendered extravagant homage to a boy patron? Is it likely that one who so deeply felt the moral order of the world would have yielded, as the poems to his dark lady acknowledge, to a vulgar temptation of the senses? or, yielding, would have told his shame in verse? Objections are brought forward against identifying the youth of the Sonnets with Southampton or with Pembroke; it is pointed out that the writer speaks of himself as old, and that in a sonnet published in Shakspere's thirty-fifth year; here evidently he cannot have spoken in his own person, and if not here, why elsewhere? Finally, it is asserted that the poems lack internal harmony; no real person can be—what Shakspere's friend is described as being—true and false, constant and fickle, virtuous and vicious, of hopeful expectation, and publicly blamed for careless living.

Shakspere speaks of himself as old; true, but in the sonnet published in The Passionate Pilgrim (138), he speaks as a lover, contrasting himself, skilled in the lore of life, with an inexperienced youth; doubtless at thirty-five he was not a Florizel nor a Ferdinand. In the poems to his friend, Shakspere is addressing a young man perhaps of twenty years, in the fresh bloom of beauty; he celebrates with delight the floral grace of youth, to which the first touch of time will be a taint; those lines of thought and care, which his own mirror shows, bear witness to time's ravage. It is as a poet that Shakspere writes, and his statistics are those not of arithmetic but of poetry.

That he should have given admiration and love without measure to a youth highborn, brilliant, accomplished, who singled out the player for peculiar favour, will seem wonderful only to those who keep a constant guard upon their affections, and to those who have no need to keep a guard at all. In the Renascence epoch, among natural products of