Page:Shakspeare and His Times (1852).djvu/69

 poem of “Venus and Adonis,” need to be excused, it must be confessed, by the effervescence of a youth too much addicted to dreams of pleasure not to attempt to reproduce them in all their forms. In “Venus and Adonis,” the poet, absolutely carried away by the voluptuous power of his subject, seems entirely to have lost sight of its mythological wealth. Venus, stripped of the prestige of divinity, is nothing but a beautiful courtesan, endeavoring unsuccessfully, by all the prayers, tears, and artifices of love, to stimulate the languid desires of a cold and disdainful youth. Hence arises a monotony which is not redeemed by the simple gracefulness and poetic merit of many passages, and which is augmented by the division of the poem into stanzas of six lines, the last two of which almost invariably present a jeu d’esprit. But a metre singularly free from irregularities, a cadence full of harmony, and a versification which had never before been equaled in England, announced the ‘‘honey-tongued poet,” and the poem of ‘‘Lucrece” appeared soon afterward to complete those epic productions which for some time sufficed to maintain his glory.

After having, in “Venus and Adonis,” employed the most lascivious colors to depict the pangs of unsatisfied desire, Shakspeare has described, in ‘‘The Rape of Lucrece,” with the chastest pen, and by way of reparation, as it were, the progress and triumph of criminal lust. The refinement of the ideas, the affectation of the style, and the merits of the versification, are the same in both works: the poetry in the second is less brilliant, but more emphatic, and abounds less in graceful images than in lofty thoughts; but we can already discern indications of a profound acquaintance with the feelings of man, and great talent in developing them in a dramatic form, by means