Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. What power is it which mounts my love so high That makes me see and cannot feed mine eye? The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes and kiss like native things. Impossible be strange attempts to those That weigh their pains in sense and do suppose What hath been cannot be: whoever strove To show her merit that did miss her love? The king's disease--my project may deceive me, But my intents are fixed and will not leave me. Besides its formal construction and its rhyme, this passage is overmuch afflicted with youngness to be accepted as the product of any other than Shakespeare's very earliest period. Of like quality to this are other passages scattered through the play. For example, the Countess's speech, Act I., Sc. 3, beginning, "Even so it was with me"; all the latter part of Act II., Sc. 1, from Helen's speech, "What I can do," etc., to the end, seventy lines; passages in the third scene of this act, which the reader cannot now fail at once to detect for himself; Helen's letter, Act III., Sc. 4, and Parolles's, Act IV., Sc. 3; and various passages in the last act. Shakespeare, I have no doubt, wrote this play at first nearly all in rhyme in the earliest years of his dramatic life, and afterward, late in his career, possibly on two occasions, rewrote it and gave it a new name; using prose, to save time and labor, in those passages the elevation of which did not require poetical treatment, and in those which were suited to such treatment giving us true, although not highly finished specimens of his grand style. A few of the plays now remain unnoticed; but our purpose is accomplished without further particular remark. The reader who has gone thus far with me needs me no longer as a guide. The Roman plays, "Coriolanus," "Julius Caesar," and "Antony and Cleopatra," particularly the last, should now receive his careful attention. In "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest," and "Henry VIII." he will find the very last productions of Shakespeare's pen, and in the first and the third of these he will find marks of hasty work both in the versification and in the construction; but the touch of the master is unmistakable quite through them all, and "The Tempest" is one of the most perfect of his works in all respects. No true lover of Shakespeare should neglect the Sonnets, although many do neglect them. They are inferior to the plays; but only to them.