Who will beleeve my verses in time to come If it were fil'd with your most high deserts? Though yet heaven knows, it is but as a tombe _Which hides your life_, and shewes not halfe your parts: If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say this Poet lies, Such heavenly touches nere toucht earthly faces. So should my papers (yellowed with their age) Be scorn'd, like old men of lesse truth than tongue, And your true rights be termd a Poets rage And stretched miter of an Antique song. But were some childe of yours alive that time, You should live twise, in it and in my rime." * * * * * "Yet doe thy worst, ould Time, dispight thy wrong My love shall in my verse ever live young." He realises that he no longer answers Ophelia's description: "The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword: The expectancy and rose of the fair state The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers.... That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth." But he cannot forget what he has been, he cannot realise that he is no longer the brilliant youth whose miniature he has before him, with the words inscribed around, "Si tabula daretur digna animum mallem"--If materials could be found worthy to paint his mind ("O could he but have drawn his wit") and then with a burst of poetic enthusiasm he exclaims:-- "Tis thee (myselfe) that for myselfe I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy daies." This is the common experience of a man as he advances in life. So long as he does not see his reflection in a glass, if he tries to visualize himself, he sees the youth or young man. Only in his most pessimistic moments does he realise his age. There is no longer any difficulty in understanding Shakespeare's Sonnets. They were addressed by "Shakespeare," the poet, to the marvellous youth who was known under the name of Francis Bacon, and they were written, with Hilliard's portrait placed on his table before him. In that age (please God it may be the present age), which is known only to God and to the fates when the finishing touch shall be given to Bacon's fame,[50] it will be found that the period of his life from twelve to thirty-five years of age surpassed all others, not only in brilliant intellectual achievements, but for the enduring wealth with which he endowed his countrymen. And yet it was part of his scheme of life that his connection with the great renaissance in English literature should lie hidden until posterity should recognise that work as the fruit of his brain:--"Mente Videbor"--"by the mind I shall be seen." How lacking all his modern biographers have been in perception! Every difficulty in those which are termed the procreation Sonnets disappears with the application of this key. Only by it can Sonnet 22 be made intelligible:--