Though Shakespeare is dolefully impressed by the decay and destruction of all material things and by the evanescent nature of beauty, he has no doubt whatever of the immortality of the verses he is writing. He vaunts as boldly as ever Horace did--indeed, in words that suggest the _Exegi monumentum_ ode--that his verses will outlast the proudest works of man. It is a sorry anti-climax to such a boast that the poet harps on the immortality of the dissolute youth as a consequence of the sonnets having an eternity of renown. Was there ever such a puzzling and unworthy association of ideas? The puzzle is rendered more perplexing still by the fact that Shakespeare took no pains to enlighten posterity as to the identity of the youth he praises, or even to supervise the publication of the sonnets. Thorpe's piratical edition was full of misprints, but Shakespeare, so far as we know, took no notice of it, and made no attempt, by giving the world a correct and authentic version, to secure what his verses declare him to be anxious to bring about, viz., the renown of his friend among generations to come. For us the youth still exists, no doubt, but not as an historical character. _He takes his place among the creatures of the poets imagination, and is far more of a shadow or phantom than any one of them._[14] _If we suppose_ the sonnets to be connected with real life, it is not easy to understand why the radiant youth, "the world's fresh ornament," "only herald to the gaudy spring," etc., should need such an amount of persuasion to marry. Seventeen sonnets of great poetical beauty and felicitous language are devoted to this object. It is an exquisite treat to read them as works of art, but taken literally they are unspeakably absurd. No sane man would draw out such lengths of linked sweetness for the purpose named; nor would any youth, however credulous, _take the sonnets at their face value_. Shakespeare is merely practising his art, and we may be perfectly sure that these "sugared" sonnets (as Meres calls them), if they did circulate among the poet's private friends, were regarded as rhetorical exercises. They are intensely interesting, as showing the overpoweringly dramatic nature of Shakespeare's genius. Being impressed with the desirability of perpetuating beauty, he is driven to express the idea in the conventional form of a sonnet-sequence. The result is an exhaustiveness of treatment, a wealth of imaginative ornament, and a dramatic vividness of presentation that makes the reader marvel how so much could be made out of so little.