character. Love, while it is only in the fancy, is foolish and fantastical. It is nothing till it is in the will, and till it fixes itself on a real object. But the love, the loving person, the passion, and the emotion of love may remain one, and yet be directed in succession to various objects, as it climbs the scala amoris, or degrades itself from a higher to a lower kind of love, or is obliged to change by the mere wane and waste of time. But the doctrine of the old sonnet writers was not that of Mr. Tennyson. He sings:

God gives us love; something to love
He lends us; but when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls off, and love is left alone.

They, on the contrary, held that when one object fell off, it only revealed a better and higher object behind it, on which the widowed love at once fastened itself. not faithlessly forgetting the object it had just lost, but finding it again in a better and higher form in the new object. This was explained intellectually to be a process of successive abstraction by Ficinus, who tells us to abstract from body its matter and place, and we have mind; from the form of mind to abstract change in time, and keep only the multiple composition, and we have angel; from angel to abstract the multiple composition of forms, and we have simple form, pure Light, or God. On the other hand it was explained to be a process of accumulation by Blosius, who finds in God every beauty that exists apart in angels, or souls, or men, or animals, or plants, or suns, or stars. But in neither system is the widowed love left alone; she ever finds her widowhood to be the occasion for a step upwards on the ladder of love. Thus, as Plato tells us in the Lycis, the affection can be transferred by association from its primitive object to new ones, and yet the primitive object will still remain the real one; the other objects only operating on the mind by recalling to it, and carrying it back to, its primitive love. Thus, the affection for the new objects, he says, is only the affection for the old one under other denominations and disguises. But this is only an analogous case; it happens when the absent lover clings to every show which reminds him of the beloved one, and declares of them all

They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.

D

Here love lends itself to many collateral objects without being false to its great object. It is a higher stage when all collateral, all inferior objects are summed up in the main object, and live a second life in him. Thus, in Shakespeare's one friend all former friendships revive

66

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

...

And there reigns love, and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live
Their images I loved I view in thee.

For love is by nature and by necessity progressive. It must ever be loving higher objects, or loving the same. objects in a higher manner. First, it is born in the eyes, and enthralled to the outward show. Then it grows independent of the eyes; for absence proves that love ranges where the eyes see not, and that the image of the absent supplies for his presence. Then the lover comes to see that the real object of love is not exactly the unknown reality, the secret of which the beloved object carries in his own breast-for eyes "draw but what they see, paint not the heart"—but the image which exists in the lover's imagination. This stage of love is appropriately called 'fancy." It is the activity of the feeling for its own sake -love enamoured of itself, and not yet solidly groundeda Proteus-a wandering ship ready to anchor in any bay. It is naturally inconstant, for it bears its ideal within; and, in the phrenzied glow of its imagination, it can fit this ideal first to one real person and then to another-to a Hermia, and then to a Helena, and back again to Hermia. Fancy, however, cures itself; each change is painful and shameful; pain and shame on the one hand, and the joy of return on the other, change fancy to fidelity. Fidelity no longer loves merely its own ideal-an ideal that fits indifferently to all realities; but it loves an ideal that is found to correspond to one and one only-to one who satisfies the ideal, in spite of the wane of the corporeal beauty which first aroused the passion. The fancy with its corporeal images fades away; and love is found to consist in the marriage of true minds, in a mutual render, in a mental correspondence, on which, in spite of death and time, constancy stamps the seal of immortality, and completeness impresses the semblance of infinitude. For it

gathers up all lesser loves into the one sovereign love, which thus becomes all in all; and the love of the known brother emerges through death into the love of the unknown God.

There is then a unity which underlies all kinds of loves, and allows us to speak of the highest in terms of the lowest, and of the lowest in terms of the highest. A Persian school of mystics is said to transform by its interpretation the Bacchic couplets of Hafiz into the most devout hymns. For there is a spiritual drunkenness as well as a material one; and the logic of one is like the logic of the other. The unity which unites all kinds of love is far more close; and the religious interpretation of the Song of Solomon must be far easier than that of Hafiz's anacreontics. On the first reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets we seem to see only the passionate love for an earthly beauty. The next reading may reveal to us that this love is as much directed to the beauty of mind as to that of body. A third reading begins to dim the personal outlines: the object of Shakespeare's love begins to expand into something more general, more universal than the individual friend-something to which immortality and infinity themselves are not strangers. As this gradual growth in meaning is strictly in accord with the precepts of the philosophy which Shakespeare followed, it would be absurd to overlook it, or to neglect the natural explanation which it gives for such scandals as have been extracted out of Sonnets 40-42, or out of the profane application of the words of the Lord's Prayer to an earthly love in Sonnet 108. Religious allusions may abound in the love-poetry of a Platonist without the slightest profanity; for they only express the poet's sense of the identity of love in all its forms, and the community and interchangeableness of the terms applied to its various phases.

Thus, love of all kinds goes through three phases; first it is dormant, then phrenzied, then ecstatic. And its end is the rest and peace of the intellect by marriage with truth and reality, or of the soul by its marriage with the objective mind. Both intellectually and morally it expresses the progress of the soul from infinitesimal beginnings to an end all but infinite.

CHAPTER IV.

THE TRUE ORDER OF THE SONNETS.

THE first edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets, though it fies no positive evidence of being issued under the author's superintendence, yet on the other hand bears none of the marks of surreptitious and unauthorized publication which are so conspicuous in the original quarto edition of the several plays. The printing is exceptionally correct for the time, and the book is dedicated by the publisher to Mr. W. H., the "only begetter" of the Sonnets, who is apparently identified as the man for whom the poet made all the promises of immortality which they contain. For him they had been written or arranged in definite series, intended to illustrate the progress of a known philosophy. There is no reason to suppose that, in delivering them to the printer, he would have broken their continuity and confounded their order; and we ought therefore to suppose, till the contrary is demonstrated, that the order in which they stand is that which was intended by their author.

It is true that most of those who have written on the Sonnets have taken it for granted that their order is merely accidental, and have therefore taken the liberty of arranging them in new groups according to supposed internal similarities, or external relationships to persons and events. But none of those writers who have thus rearranged them seem to have given themselves the trouble to enquire whether it might not be possible to explain them as a series in their present order. They have first of all assumed some theory-that the Sonnets are historical, or that they are mere versifications of separate sentiments— and have thereupon proceeded to group them afresh, according to the persons or events they are supposed to touch, or

according to the sentiment each may appear chiefly to

enunciate.

And yet, if these poems are examined in the light of the common sonnet-philosophy of that poetical Platonism which had inspired compositions of this kind ever since their rise—their sequence is quite natural, and they need no new grouping to make them into a single orderly poem. Indeed, examined in this light, they appear to be articulated and arranged with rare subtlety and care. The most superficial examination makes it appear that the 154 Sonnets are divided into two series. The first, consisting of 126, is addressed to a fair youth; the second, consisting of the remaining 28, is addressed to a black-haired, black-eyed, and dark-featured woman. It further appears that the love depicted in the first series is a force ever growing, triumphing over obstacles, and becoming ever purer and brighter; while the love sung in the second series is bad in its origin, interrupted but not destroyed by fits of remorse, and growing worse and worse with time. Such is the general construction of the book of Sonnets. And Shakespeare tells us that his intention was to exhibit two such loves. The opening quatrain of the 144th Sonnet is as follows:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,

Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,

The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.

The two loves answer to friendship and concupiscence, the amor amicitiae and amor concupiscentia of the schools. The former love has its revolutions, but each time it returns to itself with renewed strength: it is the true infinite-the circular motion which is both perfect and endless. The other love is the false infinite-the eternal alternation of yes and no, without any true progress or any attempt at perfection. It is fickle, false, and fraudulent-perverse, selfcontradictory, and full of change. In it the sense and conscience are at war. Sometimes one triumphs, sometimes the other: there is, however, no definite victory, but a perpetual approach to the final despair of the conscience, and the wearied indifference of sense. In the two series of Sonnets these two kinds of love are put through their trials. The higher love undergoes its probation of