In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take,

From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed.

Compare also Spenser, Amoretti, 64.

9. One. The Quarto has "our."

12. A vengeful canker eat him, etc. So Venus and Adonis, 1. 656:

This canker that eats up Love's tender spring.

The metaphor of the canker appears also in a sonnet not far distant, XCV.

14. But sweet. Sidney Walker proposes scent.

C. Written after a cessation from sonnet-writing, during which Shakspere had been engaged in authorship,writing plays for the public as I suppose, instead of poems for his friend.

3. Fury, poetic enthusiasm, as in Love's Labour's Lost, Act IV. sc. 3, 1. 229.

66

9. Resty, torpid. "Resty, piger, lentus," Coles's Latin and English Dictionary (quoted by Dyce). Compare 'Resty-stiff," Edward III., Act II. sc. 3 (p. 51, ed. Delius). "Resty" in Cymbeline, Act III. sc. 6, 1. 34, may mean uneasy. In Troilus and Cressida, Act 1. sc. 3, 1. 263, the Folios have rusty.

11. Satire. "Satire is satirist. Jonson, Masque of Time Vindicated, Gifford, vol. viii. p. 5

EARS.

Who's this?

'Tis Chronomastix, the brave satyr. NOSE. The gentleman-like satyr, cares for nobody.

Poetaster, V. I. vol. ii. p.

524:

The honest satyr hath the happiest soul."

W. S. WALKER.

14. Prevent'st, dost frustrate by anticipating.

CI. Continues the address to his muse, calling on her to sing again the praises of his friend; c. calls on her to praise his beauty; CI. his "truth in beauty dyed." 6. His colour, the colour of my love (i.e., my friend). 7. To lay, to spread on a surface, to lay on. Twelfth Night, Act I. sc. 5, 1. 258:

'Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white

Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on.

CII. In continuation. An apology for having ceased to sing.

3. That love is merchandiz'd, etc. So in Love's Labour's Lost, Act II. sc. 1, 11. 13-16 :

My beauty, though but mean,

Needs not the painted flourish of your praise :
Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.

7. Summer's front. So The Winter's Tale, Act IV. sc. 4, 1. 3:

No shepherdess, but Flora

Peering in April's front.

Coriolanus, Act II. sc. 1, 1. 57, “One that converses with the forehead of the morning."

8. Her pipe. The Quarto has "his pipe." Corrected by Housman in his Collection of English Sonnets (1835). Compare Twelfth Night, Act 1. sc. 4, 1. 32:

Thy small pipe

Is as the maiden's organ.

CIII. Continues the same apology.

3. The argument, all bare, the theme of my verse merely as it is in itself.

6, 7. So The Tempest, Act IV. sc. 1, 1. 10:—

For thou shalt find she will outstrip all praise
And make it halt behind her.

9, 10. So King Lear, Act I. sc. 4, 1. 369 :-
Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.

And King John, Act IV. sc. 2, 11. 28, 29:

When workmen strive to do better than well,
They do confound their skill in covetousness.

CIV. Resumes the subject from which the poet started in Sonnet c. After absence and cessation from song, he resurveys his friend's face, and inquires whether Time has stolen away any of its beauty. Note the important reference to time-three years "since first I saw you fresh." 2. Eyed. So in The Two Noble Kinsmen, "I ear'd her language."

3. Three winters cold. Dyce reads, perhaps rightly, "winters' cold." The Quarto in 3, 4, has "Winters cold summers pride.”

4. Three summers' pride. So Romeo and Juliet, Act I. sc. 2, 1. 10:

Let two more summers wither in their pride.

10. Steal from his figure, creep from the figure on the dial. So in Sonnet LXXVII., "thy dial's shady stealth." 13. For fear of which, because I fear which.

CV. To the beauty praised in C., and the truth and beauty in CI., Shakspere now adds a third perfection, kindness; and these three sum up the perfections of his friend.

1, 4. Let not my love, etc. "Because the continual repetition of the same praises seemed like a form of worship."-W. S. WALKER. Compare CVIII. 1-8.

CVI. The last line of Sonnet cv. declares that his friend's perfections were never before possessed by one person. This leads the poet to gaze backward on the famous persons of former ages, men and women, his friend being possessor of the united perfections of both man and woman (as in Sonnets XX. and LIII.).

1. Chronicle. Prof. Hales asks, "What chronicle is he thinking of? The Faerie Queene?"

8. Master, possess, own as a master. So King Henry V., Act II. sc. 4, 1. 137 :

You'll find a difference

Between the promise of his greener days
And these he masters now.

9. Compare Constable's Diana :

Miracle of the world I never will deny

That former poets praise the beauty of their days;
But all those beauties were but figures of thy praise,
And all those poets did of thee but prophecy.

12. They had not skill enough. The Quarto has "still enough," on which a meaning may be forced: "Only divining your beauty, they did not as yet possess enough to sing your worth."

CVII. Continues the celebration of his friend, and rejoices in their restored affection. Mr. Massey explains this sonnet as a song of triumph for the death of Elizabeth, and the deliverance of Southampton from the Tower. Elizabeth (Cynthia) is the eclipsed mortal moon of 1. 5. Compare Antony and Cleopatra, Act III. sc. 13, 1. 153 :

Alack, our terrene moon (i.e., Cleopatra)

Is now eclipsed.

But an earlier reference to a moon-eclipse (xxxv. 1. 3) has to do with his friend, not with Elizabeth, and in the present sonnet the moon is imagined as having endured. her eclipse, and come out none the less bright. I interpret (agreeing with Mr. Simpson, Philosophy of Shakspere's Sonnets, p. 78): "Not my own fears (that my friend's beauty may be on the wane, Sonnet CIV. 9-14) nor the prophetic soul of the world, prophesying in the persons of dead knights and ladies your perfections (Sonnet CVI.), and so prefiguring your death (or, possibly, divining other future perfections higher than yours), can confine my lease