en read with the one preceding, clearly
indicates that it was written as a greeting or salutation after
absence, and on the poet's return to his friend. In it he says:

Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
_If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay_,
And make _Time's spoils_ despised everywhere.
Give my love fame faster _than Time wastes life_;
So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife.

Closely following, in Sonnet CIV., the poet says:

To me, fair friend, _you never can be old_,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,[10]

* * * * *

In process of the seasons have I seen,

* * * * *

Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived[11]:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.

The thought is: your beauty may be passing; it may be that my eye that
sees it not, is deceived. We should carefully note the words, "Three
winters cold," "Since first I saw you fresh, which _yet_ are green."
Though they present no clear or sharp indication as to the age of his
friend, yet I think that of them this may be fairly said: the word
"green" is used as opposed to ripe or matured, and his friend's age is
such that three years seem to the poet to have carried him a step
toward maturity. And so reading these words, they harmonize with the
expression of the poet's fear that his great love for his friend may
have prevented him from seeing his beauty

like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure.

In Sonnet LXX. the poet says of his friend:

And thou present'st a pure unstained prime.
Thou hast pass'd by _the ambush of young days_,
Either not assail'd, or victor being charged.

In Sonnet LXXVII. the poet says:

The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know
Time's thievish progress to eternity.

Sonnet CXXVI. is as follows:

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
T