Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But _you_ shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of _your memory_. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall _you_ pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgment that yourself arise, _You_ live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes. Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten; From hence _your_ memory death cannot take, Although in _me_ each part will be forgotten. _Your_ name from hence immortal life shall have, Though I, once gone, _to all the world must die_: The earth can yield _me_ but a common grave, When _you_ entombed in men's eyes shall lie. _Your monument_ shall be _my gentle verse_, Which eyes not yet created shall o'er-read; And tongues to be _your_ being shall rehearse, When all the breathers of this world are dead; _You_ still shall live--such virtue hath _my_ pen-- Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. In all the plays and poems of Shakespeare, including these Sonnets, there is no mention of any man or woman then living. The only mention of a person then living made by our poet, either in prose or verse, is in the dedication of the two poems to the Earl of Southampton. To Shakespeare, to Shakespeare alone, have the Shakespearean poems and plays been a monument; and for him have they done precisely that which the poet says his "gentle verse" was to do for his friend; and they have not done so in any degree for any other. An anonymous writer in Chambers's _Edinburgh Journal_, in August, 1852, seems to have been one of the first to suggest the doubt as to the authorship of the Shakespearean plays. His suggestion was that their real author was "some pale, wasted student ... with eyes of genius gleaming through despair" who found in Shakespeare a purchaser, a publisher, a friend, and a patron. If that theory is correct, the man that penned those Sonnets sleeps, as he said he would, in an unrecorded grave, while his publisher, friend and patron, precisely as he also said, has a place in the Pantheon of the immortals. Very many of these Sonnets seem to be evolved from, or kindred to, the thought so sharply presented in Sonnets LV. and LXXXI. I would refer the reader particularly to Sonnets XXXVIII., XLIX., LXXI., LXXII, and LXXXVIII. The last two lines of Sonnet LXXI. are as follows: Lest the _wise_ world should look into your moan, And mock you with me after I am gone. The first lines of Sonnet LXXII. are as follows: