we feel the commonplace of literature, revived with lyric emotion. Note too in the _Sonnets_ their pensiveness, their exquisite moral tone, their wealth of psychological allusions, in which we often recognise the poet of the great plays. Sometimes there echoes in them that malediction of the chains of pleasure, which will afterwards become _Anthony and Cleopatra_[1]; at others we hear Hamlet, tormented and perplexed; yet more often we catch glimpses of reality as appearance and appearance as reality, as in the _Dream_ or the _Tempest._ The truth is that the soul of Shakespeare, poured into a fixed and therefore inadequate mould, his lyrical impulse confined to the epigrammatic, cause the poetry to flow together there, but deny to it complete expansion and unfolding. To note but one example, the celebrated sonnet LXVI ("Tired with all these for restful death I cry"), is in the manner of Hamlet, but developed analytically, by means of enumerations and parallelisms, and in obedience to literary usage, and is obliged to terminate on the cadence of a madrigal, in the last rhymed couplet. The soft, flexible verse of the early _Venus and Adonis_ is also free of Marino's cold ingenuity, of his external sonority and melody, and is inspired rather with a sense of voluptuousness, a grace, an elegance, which recall at times the stanzas of Politian: The night of sorrow now is turned to day; Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth, Like the fair sun, when in his fresh array He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth: And as the bright sun glorifies the sky, So is her face illumined with her eye. In Shakespeare is nothing of the cold literary exercise; he takes a vivid interest even in the play of fancy, in the bringing about of marvellous coincidences, of unexpected meetings, in the romantic and the idyllic. He loves all these things, composing them for his own enjoyment and fondling them with the magic of his style. He cannot of course make them what they are not, he cannot change their intimate qualities into something different from what they are; he cannot destroy their externality, since they came to him from without. What he can and does put into them is above all their attractiveness as images. For this reason, the poetry that we find here is of necessity rather superficial and tenuous, far more so than the poetry of the love dramas, where his powers have a wider scope for observation, for reflexion and for meditation upon human affections.