“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. Some time too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” SONNET XX. “A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion; A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes, and women’s souls amazeth; And for a woman wert thou first created; Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting, And by addition me of thee defeated, By adding one thing to my purpose nothing. But since she pricked thee out for women’s pleasure, Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.” SONNET CIV. “To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I ey’d, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold Have from the forest shook three summers’ pride; Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons I have seen; Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, 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; For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred, Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.” SONNET CVIII. “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 new 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.” [Sidenote: _Merchant of Venice_]