d, any
deliberate intention of executing a _tour de force_ in the composition of
these poems or, in his relinquishment of the style, any deliberate
rejection of the kind as unworthy of his powers on the other. He appears to
have been eminently one of those persons who care neither to be in nor out
of the fashion, but follow it as far as suits and amuses them. Yet,
beautiful as these poems are, they so manifestly do not present their
author at the full of his powers, or even preluding in the kind wherein the
best of those powers were to be shown, that they require comparatively
little critical notice. As things delightful to read they can hardly be
placed too high, especially the _Venus_; as evidences of the poet's
many-sided nature, they are interesting. But they are in somewhat other
than the usual sense quite "simple, sensuous, and passionate." The
misplaced ingenuity which, neglecting the _unum necessarium_, will busy
itself about all sorts of unnecessary things, has accordingly been rather
hard put to it with them, and to find any pasture at all has had to browse
on questions of dialect, and date, and personal allusion, even more jejune
and even more unsubstantial than usual.

It is quite otherwise with the _Sonnets_. In the first place nowhere in
Shakespere's work is it more necessary to brush away the cobwebs of the
commentators. This side of madness, no vainer fancies have ever entered the
mind of man than those which have been inspired by the immaterial part of
the matter. The very initials of the dedicatee "W. H." have had volumes
written about them; the _Sonnets_ themselves have been twisted and
classified in every conceivable shape; the persons to whom they are
addressed, or to whom they refer, have been identified with half the
gentlemen and ladies of Elizabeth's court, and half the men of letters of
the time; and every extremity and eccentricity of non-natural
interpretation has been applied to them. When they are freed from this
torture and studied rationally, there is nothing mysterious about them
except the mystery of their poetical beauty. Some of them are evidently
addressed in the rather hyperbolical language of affection, common at the
time, and derived from the study of Greek and Italian writers, to a man;
others, in language not hyperbolical at all, to a woman. Disdain, rivalry,
suspense, short-lived joy, long sorrow, all the symptoms and concomitants
of the passion of love--which are only commonpla