f his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you?"

or

"Then hate me if thou wilt,"

with the whole sonnet which it opens; or

"When in the chronicle of a wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;"

or that most magnificent quatrain of all,

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."

Any competent judge of the formal part of poetry must admit that its force
can no farther go. Verse and phrase cannot be better moulded to the
melodious suggestion of beauty. Nor, as even these scraps show, is the
thought below the verse. Even if Hallam's postulate of misplaced and
ill-regulated passion be granted (and I am myself very far from granting
it), the extraordinary wealth of thought, of knowledge, of nature, of
self-knowledge, of clear vision of others in the very midst of the
circumstances which might make for unclear vision, is still unmistakable.
And if the poet's object was to catch up the sum of love and utter it with
or even without any special relation to his own actual feelings for any
actual person (a hypothesis which human nature in general, and the nature
of poets in particular, makes not improbable), then it can only be said
that he has succeeded. From Sappho and Solomon to Shelley and Mr.
Swinburne, many bards have spoken excellently of love: but what they have
said could be cut out of Shakespere's sonnets better said than they have
said it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the greatest of poets.

With the third and in every sense chief division of the work, the
necessities for explanation and allowance cease altogether. The
thirty-seven plays of the ordinary Shakesperian canon comprise the
greatest, the most varied, the most perfect work yet done by any man in
literature; and what is more, the work of which they consist is on the
whole the most homogeneous and the least unequal ever so done. The latter
statement is likely to be more questioned than the former; but I have no
fear of failing to make it out. In one sense, no doubt, Shakespere is
unequal--as life is. He is not always at the tragic heights of Othello and
Hamlet, at the comic raptures of Falstaff and Sir Toby, at the romantic
ecstasies of Romeo and Titania. Neither is life. But he