INTRODUCTORY NOTICE TO THE POEMS." 6 of selfishness that the intellect becomes fitted for re ceiving the inspirations of genius."* "In the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather." These are the words which, in relation to the Venus and What Mr. Hare so justly considers as the great Adonis,' Shakspere addressed, in 1593, to the Earl of moving principle of " classical poetry,"—what he furSouthampton. Are we to accept them literally? Was ther notes as the pre-eminent characteristic of "our own the Venus and Adonis' the first production of Shak- great dramatist,"-is abundantly found in that great spere's imagination? Or did he put out of his view those dramatist's earliest work. Coleridge was the first to dramatic performances which he had then unquestion-point out this pervading quality in the Venus and ably produced, in deference to the critical opinions which regarded plays as works not belonging to "invention"? We think that he used the words in a literal sense. We regard the 'Venus and Adonis' as the production of a very young man, improved, perhaps, considerably in the interval between its first composition and its publication, but distinguished by peculiarities which belong to the wild luxuriance of youthful power, -such power, however, as few besides Shakspere have ever possessed. A deep thinker and eloquent writer, Julius Charles Hare, thus describes "the spirit of self-sacrifice," as applied to poetry :— "The might of the imagination is manifested by its launching forth from the petty creek, where the accidents of birth moored it, into the wide ocean of being, by its going abroad into the word around, passing into whatever it meets with, animat og it, and becoming one with it. This complete union. and identification of the poet with his poem,-this suppression of his own individual insulated consciousness, with its narrowness of thought and pettiness of feeling,-is what we admire in the great masters of that which for this reason we justly call classical poetry, a representing that which is symbolical and universal, not that which is merely occasional and peculiar. This gives them that majestic calmness which still breathes upon us from the statues of their gods. Th. invests their works with that lucid transparent atmosphere wherein every form stands out in perfect definiteness and distinctness, only beautified | by the distance which idealizes it. This has delivered those works from the casualties of time and space, and has lifted them up like stars into the pure firmament of thought, so that they do not shine on one spot alone, nor fade like earthly flowers, but journey on from clime to clime, shedding the light of beauty on generation after generation. The same quality, amounting to a total extinction of his own selfish being, so that his spirit became a mighty organ through which Nature gave utterance to the full diapason of her notes, is what we wonder at in our own great dramatist, and is the groundwork of all his other powers: for it is only when purged Adonis ;' and he has done this so admirably, that it would be profanation were we to attempt to elucidate the point in any other than his own words : "It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters them. selves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of imagery, always vivid, and, because unbroken, often minute,-by the highest effort of the picturesque in words of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realised by any other poet, even Dante not excepted,-to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader,—from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images,—and, above all, from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst,—that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account."t You Coleridge, in the preceding chapter of his 'Literary The Victory of Faith; and other Sermons. By Julius Charles Hare, M.A. 1840. P. 277. + Biographia Jiteraria,' 1817, vol. ii. p. 15. The present edition of the Poems of Shakspere comprises the VENUS AND ADONIS, THE RAPE OF LUCRECE, THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM, THE LOVER'S COMPLAINT, and the SONNETS. The Songs from the Plays of Shakspere are necessarily excluded from this dition, it being sufficient for the reader to make a reference to the Dramas to which they respectively belong. Life,' says, "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry-the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination." In Coleridge's 'Literary Remains' the Venus and Adonis' is cited as furnishing a signal example of " that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world." The description of the hare-hunt is there given at length as a specimen of this power. A remarkable proof of the completeness as well as accuracy of Shakspere's description lately presented itself to our mind, in running through a little volume, full of talent, published in 1825-Essays and Sketches of Character, by the late Richard Ayton, Esq. There is a paper on hunting, and especially on hare-hunting. He says "I am not one of the perfect fox-hunters of these realms; but having been in the way of late of seeing a good deal of various modes of hunting, I would, for the benefit of the uninitiated, set down the results of my observations." In this matter he writes with a perfect unconsciousness that he is describing what any one has described before. But as accurate an observer had been before him : "She (the hare) generally returns to the seat from which she was put up, running, as all the world knows, in a circle, or something sometimes like it, we had better say, that we may keep on good terms with the mathematical. At starting, she tears away at her utmost speed for a mile or more, and distances the dogs half-way she then returns, diverging a little to the right or left, that she may not run into the mouths of her enemies a necessity which accounts for what we call the circularity of her course. Her flight from home is direct and precipitate; but on her way back, when she has gained a little time for consideration and stratagem, she describes a curious labyrinth of short turnings and windings, as if to perplex the dogs by the intricacy of her track." Compare this with Shakspere : "And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, Mr. Ayton thus goes on :— stains, recently left by a flock, are fatal: they cut of the scent irrecoverably—making a gap, as it were, in the clue, in which the dogs have not even a hint for their guidance." Compare Shakspere again : "Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep. To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell, Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies, One more extract from Mr. Ayton :"Suppose then, after the usual rounds, that you see the hare at last (a sorry mark for so many foes) sorely beleaguered-looking dark and draggled—and limping heavily along; then stopping to listen-again tottering on a little-and again stopping; and at every step, and every pause, hearing the death-cry grow nearer and louder." One more comparison, and we have exhausted Shakspere's description: "By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear, And now his grief may be compared well Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch, And being low never reliev'd by any." Here, then, be it observed, are not only the same d jects, the same accidents, the same movement, in each description, but the very words employed to convey the scene to the mind are often the same in each. It would be easy to say that Mr. Ayton copied Shakspere. We believe he did not. There is a sturdy ingenuousness about his writings which would have led him to notice the Venus and Adonis' if he had had it in his mind. Shakspere and he had each looked minutely and praetically upon the same scene; and the wonder is, t that Shakspere was an accurate describer, but that in him the accurate is so thoroughly fused with the poetical, that it is one and the same life. the accuracy of the young Shakspere's observation. Not the most experienced dealer ever knew the points of a horse better. The whole poem indeed is full of evidence that the circumstances by which the writer was surrounded, in a country district, had entered deeply into his mind, and were reproduced in the poetical form. The bird "tangled in a net"—the “ dive-dapper peering through a wave "—the “blue-veined violets ”—the "The hounds, whom we left in full cry, continue The celebrated description of the courser in the their music without remission as long as they are faith-Venus and Adonis' is another remarkable instance of ful to the scent; as a summons, it should seem, like the seaman's cry, to pull together, or keep together, and it is a certain proof to themselves and their followers that they are in the right way. On the instant that they are at fault,' or lose the scent, they are silent. 6 *** The weather, in its impression on the scent, is the great father of faults;' but they may arise from other accidents, even when the day is in every respect favourable. The intervention of ploughed land, on which the scent soon cools or evaporates, is at least perilous; but sheep "Red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field " the fisher that forbears the "ungrown fry"-the sheep | alternate rhymes formed upon the same model as those "gone to fold"—the caterpillars feeding on "the tender of the 'Venus and Adonis,' and producing the same leaves"—and, not to weary with examples, that exqui- feeling of placid delight by their exquisite harmony. site image, The same principles on which he built the versification of the Venus and Adonis' exhibited to him the grace which these elegiac harmonies would impart to the scenes of repose in the progress of a dramatic action. 'Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus' eye " all these bespeak a poet who had formed himself upon nature, and not upon books. To understand the value as well as the rarity of this quality in Shakspere, we should open any contemporary poem. Take Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' for example. We read line after line, beautiful, gorgeous, running over with a satiating luxuriousness; but we look in vain for a single familiar image. Shakspere describes what he has seen, throwing over the real the delicious tint of his own imagination. Marlowe looks at Nature herself very rarely; but he knows all the conventional images by which the real is supposed to be elevated into the poetical. His most beautiful things are thus but copies of copies. The mode in which each poet describes the morning will illustrate our meaning : "Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, Who doth the world so gloriously behold, We feel that this is true. Compare "By this Apollo's golden harp began To sound forth music to the ocean; We are taught that this is classical. Coleridge has observed that, "in the Venus and Adonis,' the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant." This self-controlling power of "varying the march of the words without passing | into a loftier and more majestic rhythm" is perhaps one of the most signal instances of Shakspere's consummate mastery of his art, even as a very young man. He who, at the proper season, knew how to strike the grandest music within the compass of our own powerful and sonorous language, in his early productions breathes out his thoughts "To the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorder." The sustained sweetness of the versification is never cloying; and yet there are no violent contrasts, no sudden elevations: all is equable in its infinite variety. The early comedies are full of the same rare beauty. In 'Love's Labour's Lost-The Comedy of Errors — A Midsummer Night's Dream'-we have verses of • Biographia Literaria,' vol. ii. p. 14. We proceed to the Lucrece.' Of that poem the date of the composition is fixed as accurately as we can desire. In the dedication to the Venus and Adonis' the poet says "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." In 1591, a year after the Venus and Adonis,' 'Lucrece' was published, and was dedicated to Lord Southampton. This, then, was undoubtedly the "graver labour;" this was the produce of the idle hours" of 1593. Shakspere was then nearly thirty years of age-the period at which it is held by some he first began to produce anything original for the stage. The poet unquestionably intended the 'graver labour" for a higher effort than had produced the "first heir" of his invention. He describes the "Venus and Adonis' as 66 unpolished lines" - lines thrown off with youthful luxuriousness and rapidity. The verses of the Lucrece' are "untutored lines"lines formed upon no established model. There is to our mind the difference of eight or even ten years in the aspect of these poems-a difference as manifest as that which exists between 'Love's Labour's Lost' and Romeo and Juliet.' Coleridge has marked the great distinction between the one poem and the other : "The "Venus and Adonis' did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection: and, lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language." It is in this paragraph that Coleridge has marked the difference which a critic of the very highest order could alone have pointed out-between the power which Shakspere's mind possessed of going out of itself in a narrative poem, and the dramatic power. The same mighty, and to most unattainable, power, of utterly subduing the self-conscious to the universal, was essential to the highest excellence of both species of composition,-the poem and the drama. But the exercise of that power was essentially different in each. Coleridge, in another place, says, "in his very first production he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself except by force of contemplation, and that Biographia Literaria,' vol. ii. p. 21. sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates."* But this "sublime faculty" went greatly farther when it became dramatic. In the narrative poems of an ordinary man we perpetually see the narrator. Coleridge, in a passage previously quoted, has shown the essential superiority of Shakspere's narrative poems, where the whole is placed before our view, the poet unparticipating in the passions. There is a remarkable example of how strictly Shakspere adhered to this principle in his beautiful poem of A Lover's Complaint. There the poet is actually present to the scene: "From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded A plaintful story from a sistering vale, My spirits to attend this double voice accorded, "From the besieged Ardea all in post, The preceding circumstances which impel this journey the most consummate art: "When they had sworn to this advised doom, They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence; The Romans plausibly did give consent incident. He delights to make the chief actors analyse their own thoughts,-reflect, explain, expostulate. All this is essentially undramatic, and he meant it to be so. But then, what pictures does he paint of the progress of the action, which none but a great dramatie poet, who had visions of future Macbeths and Othellos before him, could have painted! Look, for example, at that magnificent scene, when But not one word of comment does he offer upon the revelations of the "fickle maid full pale." The dramatic power, however, as we have said, is many steps beyond this. It dispenses with narrative altogether. It renders a complicated story, or stories, one in the action. It makes the characters reveal themselves, sometimes by a word. It trusts for everything to the capacity of an audience to appreciate the greatest sub-puts forth his strength on the accessaries of the main tilties, and the nicest shades of passion, through the action. It is the very reverse of the oratorical power, which repeats and explains. And how is it able to effect this prodigious mastery over the senses and the understanding? By raising the mind of the spectator, or reader, into such a state of poetical excitement as corresponds in some degree to the excitement of the poet, and thus clears away the mists of our ordinary vision, and irradiates the whole complex moral world in which we for a time live, and move, and have our being, with the brightness of his own intellectual sunlight. Now, it appears to us that, although the 'Venus and Adonis, and the 'Lucrece, do not pretend to be the creations of this wonderful power-their forms did not demand its complete exercise-they could not have been produced by a man who did not possess the power, and had assiduously cultivated it in its own proper field. In the second poem, more especially, do we think the power has reached a higher development, indicating itself in "a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection." Malone says, "I have observed that Painter has inserted the story of Lucrece in the first volume of his 'Palace of Pleasure,' 1567, on which I make no doubt our author formed his poem." Be it so. The story of Lucrece in Painter's novel occupies four pages. The first page describes the circumstances that preceded the unboly visit of Tarquin to Lucrece; nearly the whole of the two last pages detail the events that followed the death of Lucrece. A page and a half at most is given to the tragedy. This is proper enough in a narrative, whose business it is to make all the circumstances intelligible. But the narrative poet, who was also thoroughly master of the dramatic power, concentrates all the interest upon the main circumstances of the story. He places the scene of those circumstances before our eves at the very opening: 'Literary Remains,' vol. ii. p. 54. "No comfortable star did lend his light," of Tarquin leaping from his bed, and, softly smiting his falchion on a flint, lighting a torch "Which must be lode-star to his lustful eye.” Look, again, at the exquisite domestic incident which tells of the quiet and gentle occupation of his devoted victim: "By the light he spies Lucretia's glove, wherein her needle sticks; The hand to which that glove belongs is described in "Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet; whose perfect white In the chamber of innocence Tarquin is painted with contrast: "This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade, Which, like a falcon towering in the skies, Coucheth the fowl below with his wings' shade.' The complaint of Lucrece after Tarquin has departed was meant to be undramatic. The action advances not. The character develops not itself in the action. Bat the poet makes his heroine bewail her fate in every variety of lament that his boundless command of imagery could furnish. The letter to Collatine is written;—a letter of the most touching simplicity :— "Thou worthy lord Of that unworthy wife that greeteth thee, |