Page:Shakespeare's Sonnets.djvu/22

Rh a time when life ran swift and free, touching with its current high and difficult places, the ardent friendship of man with man was one. To elevate it above mere personal regard a kind of Neo-Platonism was at hand, which represented Beauty and Love incarnated in a human creature as earthly vicegerents of the Divinity. "It was then not uncommon," observes the sober Dyce, "for one man to write verses to another in a strain of such tender affection as fully warrants us in terming them amatory." Montaigne, not prone to take up extreme positions, writes of his dead Estienne de la Boëtie with passionate tenderness which will not hear of moderation. The haughtiest spirit of Italy, Michael Angelo, does homage to the worth and beauty of young Tommaso Cavalieri in such words as these:

The learned Languet writes to young Philip Sidney: "Your portrait I kept with me some hours to feast my eyes on it, but my appetite was rather increased than diminished by the sight." And Sidney to his guardian friend: "The chief object of my life, next to the everlasting blessedness of heaven, will always be the enjoyment of true friendship, and there you shall have the chiefest place." "Some," said Jeremy Taylor, "live under the line, and the beams of friendship in that position are imminent and perpendicular." "Some have only a dark day and a long night from him [the Sun], snows and white cattle, a miserable life and a perpetual harvest of Catarrhes and Consumptions, apoplexies and dead palsies; but some have splendid fires and aromatick spices, rich wines and well-digested fruits, great wit and great courage, because they dwell in his eye and look in his face and are the Courtiers of the Sun, and wait upon him in his Chambers of the East; just so it is in