For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee, And thou away, the very birds are mute! He dwells with complacency on her supposed truth and tenderness, her bounty, like Juliet's, "boundless as the sea, her love as deep." Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind, Still constant in a wondrous excellence. Then, as if conscious upon how unstable a foundation he had built his love, he expresses his fear lest he should be betrayed, yet remain unconscious of the wrong. For there can live no hatred in thine eye, Therefore in that I cannot know thy change! In many looks, the false heart's history Is writ in moods and frowns, and wrinkles strange. But heaven in thy creation did decree, That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell. He bitterly reproaches her with her levity and falsehood, and himself that he can be thus unworthily enslaved,-- What potions have I drunk of Syren tears, &c. Then, with lover-like inconsistency, excuses her,-- As on the finger of a throned queen The basest jewel will be well esteemed: So are those errors that in thee are seen To truths translated, and for true things deem'd. And the following are powerfully and painfully expressive:-- How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame, Which, like the canker in a fragrant rose, Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! Oh, in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose! And what a mansion have those vices got, Which for their habitation chose out thee, Where Beauty's veil doth cover every blot, And all things turn to fair that eyes can see! "Who taught thee," he says in another sonnet, --to make me love thee more The more I hear, and see just cause for hate? He who wrote these and similar passages was certainly under the full and irresistible influence of female fascination. But who it was that thus ruled the universal heart and mighty spirit of our Shakspeare, we know not. She stands beside him a veiled and a nameless phantom. Neither dare we call in Fancy to penetrate that veil; for who would presume to trace even the faintest outline of such a being as Shakspeare could have loved? * * * * * I think it doubtful to whom were addressed those exquisite lines, Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now! &c.[100] but probably to this very person. The Sonnets in which he alludes to his profession as an actor; where he speaks of the brand, "which vulgar scandal stamped upon his brow," and of having made himself "a motley to men's view,"[101] are undoubtedly addressed to Lord Southampton.