For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred,

Ere you were born, was beauty's summer dead.-104.

Let not my love be call'd idolatry,

Nor my beloved as an idol show,

Since all alike my songs and praises be,
To one, of one, still such, and ever so.
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence;
Therefore my verse, to constancy confin'd,
One thing expressing, leaves out difference.
Fair, kind, and true, is all my argument,
Fair, kind, and true, varying to other words;
And in this change is my invention spent,
Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.
Fair, kind, and true, have often liv'd alone,

Which three, till now, never kept seat in one.—105.

When in the chronicle of wasted time

I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express'd
Even such a beauty as you master now..
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And, for they look'd but with divining eyes,

They had not skill enough your worth to sing :

For we, which now behold these present days,

Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.-106.

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,

Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I 'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.-107.

What's in the brain that ink may character,

Which hath not figur'd to thee my true spirit?

What's new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love, or thy dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o'er the very same;

Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallow'd thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love's fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page;

Finding the first conceit of love there bred,

Where time and outward form would show it dead.-108.

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil❜d,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!
O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whe'r better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.

O! sure I am, the wits of former days

To subjects worse have given admiring praise.-59.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,

Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,

And Time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,

And delves the parallels in beauty's brow;

Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,

And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

And yet, to times in hope, my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.-60.

Of these eleven stanzas nine are consecutive in the original, being numbered 100 to 108. The other two, the 59th and 60th, are certainly isolated in the first arrangement; but the idea of the 108th glides into the 59th, and closes appropriately with the 60th. But there is a short poem which stands completely alone in the original edition, the 126th; and it is remarkable for being of a different metrical character, wanting the distinguishing feature of the Sonnet in its number of lines. Its general tendency, however, connects it with those which we have just given :

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour;
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow`st!

If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May time disgrace, and wretched minutes kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure:
Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.-126.

There is an enemy as potent as Time, who cuts down the pride of youth as the flower of the field. That enemy is Death; and the poet most skilfully presents the images of mortality to his " lovely boy" in connexion with the decay of the elder friend. In this portion of the poem there is a touching simplicity, which, however, is intermingled with passages which, denoting that the Poet is still speaking in character, take the stanzas, in some degree, out of the range of the real :—

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate.
For all that beauty that doth cover thee
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me;
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O therefore, love, be of thyself so wary,
As I not for myself but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary,
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.

Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain;
Thou gav'st me thine, not to give back again.-22.

Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,

And all my soul, and all my every part;

And for this sin there is no remedy,

It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account,
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp'd with tann'd antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read,
Self so self-loving were iniquity.

"T is thee (myself) that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.-62.

Against my love shall be, as I am now,

With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn;
When hours have drain'd his blood, and fill'd his brow

With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn

Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night;

And all those beauties, whereof now he's king,

Are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify

Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory

My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life.
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them, still green.-63.

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras'd,
And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate―
That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.-64.

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack!

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.-65.

Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry,

As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:

Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,

Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.-66.

Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve,
And lace itself with his society?

Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?
Why should he live now Nature bankrupt is,
Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but his,

And, proud of many, lives upon his gains.

O, him she stores, to show what wealth she had,
In days long since, before these last so bad.-67.

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty liv'd and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow:
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head,
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself, and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;

And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.-68.

Those parts of thee that the world's eye doth view
Want nothing that the thought of hearts can mend :
All tongues (the voice of souls) give thee that due,
Uttering bare truth, even so as foes commend.
Thine outward thus with outward praise is crown'd;
But those same tongues that give thee so thine own,
In other accents do this praise confound,

By seeing farther than the eye hath shown.

They look into the beauty of thy mind,

And that, in guess, they measure by thy deeds;

Then (churls) their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,

To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds :

But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,

The solve is this,—that thou dost common grow.-69.

That thou art blam'd shall not be thy defect,
For slander's mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.
So thou be good, slander doth but approve
Thy worth the greater, being woo'd of time:
For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love,
And thou present'st a pure unstained prime.