You violets that first appear, By your pure purple mantles known, So, when my mistress shall be seen In form and beauty of her mind; A Farewell to the Vanities of the World. Farewell, ye gilded follies, pleasing troubles; Farewell, ye honour'd rags, ye glorious bubbles ! Fame's but a hollow echo; gold pure clay; Honour the darling but of one short day; Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. 'I know not,' says the modest poet, in his first dedication, 'how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen; only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear (till] so barren a land.' The allusion to idle hours' seems to point to the author's profession of an actor, in which capacity he had probably attracted the attention of the Earl of Southampton; but it is not so easy to understand how the Venus and Adonis was the 'first heir of his invention,' unless we believe that it had been written in early life, or that his dramatic labours had then been confined to the adaptation of old plays, not the writing of new ones, for the stage. There is a tradition, that the Earl of Southampton on one occasion presented Shakspeare Beauty, th' eye's idol, but a damask'd skin; State but a golden prison to live in, Fame, honour, beauty, state, train, blood, and birth, with L.1000, to complete a purchase which he * wished to make. The gift was munificent, but the sum has probably been exaggerated. The Venus and Adonis is a glowing and essentially dramatic version of the well-known mythological story, full of fine descriptive passages, but objectionable on the score of licentiousness. Warton has shown that it gave offence, at the time of its publication, on account of the excessive warmth of its colouring. The Rape of Lucrece is less animated, and is perhaps an inferior poem, though, from the boldness of its figurative expressions, and its tone of dignified pathos and reflection, it is more like the hasty sketch of a great poet. Are but the fading blossoms of the earth. Welcome, pure thoughts, welcome, ye silent groves, The Character of a Happy Life. How happy is he born and taught, Who envies none that chance doth raise, Who hath his life from rumours freed, SHAKSPEARE. SHAKSPEARE, as a writer of miscellaneous poetry, claims now to be noticed, and, with the exception of the Faery Queen, there are no poems of the reign of Elizabeth equal to those productions to which the great dramatist affixed his name. In 1593, when the poet was in his twenty-ninth year, appeared his Venus and Adonis, and in the following year his Rape of Lucrece, both dedicated to Henry The sonnets of Shakspeare were first printed in 1609, by Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller and publisher of the day, who prefixed to the volume the following enigmatical dedication:-' To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W. H., all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet, wisheth the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth, T. T.' The sonnets are 154 in number. They are, with the exception of twenty-eight, addressed to some male object, whom the poet addresses in a style of affection, love, and idolatry, remarkable, even in the reign of Elizabeth, for its extravagant and enthusiastic character. Though printed continuously, it is obvious that the sonnets were written at different times, with long intervals between the dates of composition; and we know that, previous to 1598, Shakspeare had tried this species of composition, for Meres in that year alludes to his 'sugared sonnets among his private friends. We almost wish, with Mr Hallam, that Shakspeare had not written these sonnets, beautiful as many of them are in language and imagery. They represent him in a character foreign to that in which we love to regard him, as modest, virtuous, self-confiding, and independent. His excessive and elaborate praise of youthful beauty in a man seems derogatory to his genius, and savours of adulation; and when we find him excuse this friend for robbing him of his mistress-a married female-and subjecting his noble spirit to all the pangs of jealousy, of guilty love, and blind misplaced attachment, it is painful and difficult to believe that all this weakness and folly can be associated with the name of Shakspeare, and still more, that he should record it in verse which he believed would descend to future ages Not marble, not the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme. Some of the sonnets may be written in a feigned character, and merely dramatic in expression; but in others, the poet alludes to his profession of an actor, and all bear the impress of strong passion and deep sincerity. A feeling of premature age seems to have crept on Shakspeare That time of year thou may'st in me behold | As the death-bed whereon it must expire, 1 He laments his errors with deep and penitential sorrow, summoning up things past to the sessions of sweet silent thought,' and exhibiting the depths of a spirit 'solitary in the very vastness of its sympathies.' The 'W. H.' alluded to by Thorpe, the publisher, has been recently conjectured to be William Herbert, afterwards Earl of Pembroke, who (as appears from the dedication of the first folio of 1623) was one of Shakspeare's patrons. This conjecture has received the assent of Mr Hallam and others; and the author of an ingenious work on the sonnets, Mr C. Armitage Brown, has supported it with much plausibility. Herbert was in his eighteenth year, when Meres first notices the sonnets in 1598; he was learned, of literary taste, and gallant character, but of licentious life. The sonnets convey the idea, that the person to whom they were addressed was of high rank, as well as personal beauty and accomplishments. We know of only one objection to this theory-the improbability that the publisher would address William Herbert, then Earl of Pembroke, and a Knight of the Garter, as Mr W. H.' Herbert succeeded his father in the earldom in 1601, while the sonnets, as published by Thorpe, bear the date, as already stated, of 1609. The composition of these mysterious productions evinces Shakspeare's great facility in versification of a difficult order, and they display more intense feeling and passion than either of his classical poems. They have the conceits and quaint turns of expression, then common, particularly in the sonnet; but they rise to far higher flights of genuine poetry than will be found in any other poet of the day, and they contain many traces of his philosophical and reflective spirit. [The Horse of Adonis.] Look, when a painter would surpass the life, In shape, in courage, colour, pace, and bone. Sometimes he scuds far off, and there he stares; 1 To bid the wind a base: i.e. to challenge the wind to contend with him in speed: base-prison-base, or prison-bars, was rustic game, consisting chiefly in running. For through his mane and tail the high wind sings, Fanning the hairs, who wave like feather'd wings. [Venus's Prophecy after the Death of Adonis.] It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud, It shall be sparing, and too full of riot, Make the young old, the old become a child. [Selections from Shakspeare's Sonnets.] When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, Most true it is, that I have look'd on truth Whilst, like a willing patient, I will drink When to the sessions of sweet silent thought For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly No longer mourn for me when I am dead, Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now; Ah! do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow, If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, From you have I been absent in the spring, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: 1 Vinegar. Nor did I wonder at the lilies white, My love is strengthen'd, though more weak in seeming; Let me not to the marriage of true minds That looks on tempests, and is never shaken; [Selections from Shakspeare's Songs.] Blow, blow, thou winter wind, Although thy breath be rude. Then heigh, ho, the holly! Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, [At the end of 'Love's Labour Lost.] When icicles hang by the wall, And milk comes frozen home in pail; Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note, Tu-whit! tu-whoo! a merry note, 107 [In Much Ado about Nothing."] Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more; Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never: Then sigh not so, But let them go, And be you blithe and bonny; Converting all your sounds of woe Into, Hey nonny, nonny. Sing no more ditties, sing no more Of dumps so dull and heavy; The fraud of men was ever so, Since summer first was leavy. Then sigh not so, &c. [In Cymbeline.'] Fear no more the heat o' th' sun, To thee the reed is as the oak. Thou hast finished joy and moan. [From 'As you Like it.] Under the green-wood tree Unto the sweet bird's throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither; Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather. Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i' the sun; Seeking the food he eats, And pleas'd with what he gets, Come hither, come hither, come hither; Here shall he see No enemy But winter and rough weather. SIR JOHN DAVIES. SIR JOHN DAVIES (1570-1626), an English barrister, at one time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was the author of a long philosophical poem, On the Soul of Man and the nmortality thereof, supposed to have been written in 1598, and one of the earliest poems of that kind in our language. Davies is a profound thinker and close reasoner: 'in the happier parts of his poem,' says Campbell, 'we come to logical truths so well illustrated by ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts more poetically or philosophically just. The judgment and fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction.' The versification of the poem (long quatrains, was afterwards copied by Davenant and Dryden. Mr Southey has remarked that 'Sir John Davies and Sir William Davenant, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, wrote in numbers which, for precision, and clearness, and felicity, and strength, have never been surpassed.' The compact structure of Davies's verse is indeed remarkable for his times. In another production, entitled Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing, in a Dialogue between Penelope and One of her Wooers, he is much more fanciful. He there represents Penelope as declining to dance with Antinous, and the latter as proceeding to lecture her upon the antiquity of that elegant exercise, the merits of which he describes in verses partaking, as has been justly remarked, of the flexibility and grace of the subject. The following is one of the most imaginative passages : [The Dancing of the Air.] And now behold your tender nurse, the air, For when you breathe, the air in order moves, Hence is her prattling daughter, Echo, born, For after time she endeth ev'ry trick. And thou, sweet Music, dancing's only life, teach, That when the air doth dance her finest measure, Then art thou born, the gods' and men's sweet pleasure. Lastly, where keep the Winds their revelry, Their violent turnings, and wild whirling hays, Where she herself is turn'd a hundred ways, Afterwards, the poet alludes to the tidal influence of the moon, and the passage is highly poetical in expression : For lo, the sea that fleets about the land, 1 Sometimes his proud green waves in order set, The poem on Dancing is said to have been written in fifteen days. It was published in 1596. The Nosce Teipsum, or Poem on the Immortality of the Soul, bears the date (as appears from the dedication to the Queen) of 1602. The fame of these works introduced Sir John Davies to James I., who made him successively solicitor-general and attorney-general for Ireland. He was also a judge of assize, and was knighted by the king in 1607. The first Reports of Law Cases, published in Ireland, were made by this able and accomplished man, and his preface to the volume is considered 'the best that was ever prefixed to a law-book.' [Reasons for the Soul's Immortality.] Again, how can she but immortal be, And never rests till she attain to it? * All moving things to other things do move And as the moisture which the thirsty earth Long doth she stay, as loath to leave the land, Yet nature so her streams doth lead and carry E'en so the soul, which, in this earthly mould, At first her mother earth she holdeth dear, Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught For who did ever yet, in honour, wealth, Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall, So, when the soul finds here no true content, [The Dignity of Man.] Oh! what is man, great Maker of mankind! That thou to him so great respect dost bear; That thou adorn'st him with so bright a mind, Mak'st him a king, and even an angel's peer? Oh! what a lively life, what heav'nly pow'r, What spreading virtue, what a sparkling fire, How great, how plentiful, how rich a dow'r Dost thou within this dying flesh inspire! Thou leav'st thy print in other works of thine, But thy whole image thou in man hast writ; There cannot be a creature more divine, Except, like thee, it should be infinite: But it exceeds man's thought, to think how high God hath rais'd man, since God a man became ; The angels do admire this mystery, And are astonish'd when they view the same : Nor hath he given these blessings for a day, Nor made them on the body's life depend; The soul, though made in time, survives for aye; And though it hath beginning, sees no end. JOHN DONNE. JOHN DONNE was born in London in 1573, of a Catholic family; through his mother he was related to Sir Thomas More and Heywood the epigrammatist. He was educated partly at Oxford and partly at Cambridge, and was designed for the law, but relinquished the study in his nineteenth year. About this period of his life, having carefully considered the controversies between the Catholics and Protestants, he became convinced that the latter were right, and became a member of the established church. The great abilities and amiable character of Donne were early distinguished. The Earl of Essex, the Lord Chancellor Egerton, and Sir Robert Drury, successively befriended and employed him; and a saying of the second of these eminent persons respecting him is recorded by his biographers-that he was fitter to serve a king than a subject. He fell, nevertheless, into trouble, in consequence of secretly marrying the daughter of Sir George Moore, lord lieutenant of the Tower. This step kept him for several years in poverty, and by the death of his wife, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, he was plunged into the greatest grief. At the age of forty-two, Donne became a clergyman, and soon attaining distinction as a preacher, he was preferred by James I. to the deanery of St Paul's; in which benefice he continued till his death in 1631, when he was buried honourably in Westminster Abbey. The works of Donne consist of satires, elegies, religious poems, complimentary verses, and epigrams: they were first collected into one volume by Tonson in 1719. His reputation as a poet, great in his own day, low during the latter part of the seventeenth, and the whole of the eighteenth centuries, has latterly in some degree revived. In its days of abasement, critics spoke of his harsh and rugged versification, and his leaving nature for conceit: Dryden even hints at the necessity of translating him into numbers and English. It seems to be now acknowledged that, amidst much rubbish, there is much real poetry, and that of a high order, in Donne. He is described by a recent critic as 'imbued to saturation with the learning of his age,' endowed 'with a most active and piercing intellect -an imagination, if not grasping and comprehensive, most subtle and far-darting-a fancy, rich, |