and this is the explanation of the fact that multitudes of the romances of the Middle Ages represent the hero of the story as falling in love at a Church-the church figuring the virgin-mother of the faith derived from it. Nothing is more common than the use of this expression, the mother, as applied to a church, and this is also a virgin-mother. In like manner, all places of education are mothers, it being the custom of all collegiate scholars to speak of what they call their Alma Mater. The analogous use of language led our poet, in the 3d Sonnet, to speak of a mother as applied to a subject of art; and, again, in the 16th Sonnet, he uses the expression "maiden gardens," meaning virgin or unwrought subjects; which, he means to say in that Sonnet, were open to the artist.

CHAPTER II.

ASKING the reader to bear in mind the extracts from Drayton and Sidney, we will proceed to show that the object addressed in the Shakespeare Sonnets is analogous to what the latter calls Immortal Beauty and Immortal Goodness, only suggesting, as a precaution, that these are not to be regarded under any form of the imagination, but conceived as spiritual.

That this may be done, no one need be told who is in the habit of prayer himself, or in the habit of attending prayer in the church; for to whom or what does the preacher address himself when, with eyes uplifted or closed, he approaches what he calls the throne of grace? Certainly the object addressed in such cases is no visible or imaginary form wḥatever, but a conceived spirit, the spirit revealed in religion, according to the declaration of the gospel

"God is a spirit, and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth."

The Beauty of this spirit is addressed by our poet in the first Sonnet under a figurative expression"Beauty's Rose:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby Beauty's Rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,

His tender heir might bear his memory.

In this Sonnet the poet addresses the Spirit of Beauty, or the Beautiful, as the fountain of art; and, as proceeding from an artistic poet, the lines are an invocation to the Spirit of Beauty to become, as it were, his mistress, or, in the Helenic sense, his Muse or Inspiration, in order that he might perpetuate his sense of beauty in some adequate poetic form, which, preserving the figure, he calls an HEIR, precisely in the sense in which this word is used in the poet's dedication of Venus and Adonis to the Earl of Southampton, in which that poem is called the first heir of his invention.

This poetic heir is the child, the son, &c., so often referred to in most of the first sixteen or eighteen Sonnets of the series of one hundred and

fifty-four, as published in the modern editions of Shakespeare's works.

We do not consider that the Sonnets, in their present order, were written throughout under one rigid idea, incapable of variation, or that they were written in the precise order in which we now have them. We admit, also, that there may possibly be some, now embraced in the series, which the writer of them might have excluded or modified, if the collection, when first made, had been under his control; and we have but little doubt that the collection, as it comes to us, may be wanting in some few Sonnets which may be found elsewhere, or may have been lost altogether. We also suppose that the Sonnets were written at various periods or stages of life, some of them in early life, when the ideal stood before the poet's mind in all its power, and others at a later period, when the vision had either partially left or threatened to leave him, or had undergone some transformations, though without ever being absolutely denied. We can believe that the poet ultimately outgrew, not the ideal itself, but some of the forms in which it had presented itself to his early imagination; and finally, we

think we see where the poet probably ceased to indulge his imaginative faculty in the pure or abstract ideal, and confined himself to the more sober sealities of practical life, though with improved powers of understanding the great world, which, assuredly, is but a fragment of life, when its unseen counterpart is not recognized and acknowledged.

In the first Sonnet the poet expresses a desire that Beauty's Rose might never die; but that as the riper should decease, his tender heir might bear his memory.

The meaning of this is, that the forms in which the beautiful has been expressed in former ages, are liable to become antiquated, insomuch as measurably to lose the power of expressing the beautiful. This is figured by their "decease;" and the poet's desire is, that he might be so endowed himself as to be able to take up the theme in some new form to keep alive the memory" of it.

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In the 108th Sonnet the poet himself refers to the classics of antiquity as being included among the class of writings subject to decease in the sense here stated; for, as we may observe in that Sonnet, the poet saw, in those classic works,