If Shakespeare's melancholy was, like that of Jaques, a complex melancholy, a melancholy "compounded of many simples"--extracted perhaps at first from some root of bitter experience in his own life, and then fed, as his Sonnets clearly state, by a habitual sense of his own "outcast" condition in society, and by the sight of a hundred social wrongs around him, into a kind of abject dissatisfaction with himself and his fate--yet, in the end, and in its highest form, it was rather, as we have already hinted, the melancholy of Hamlet, a meditative, contemplative melancholy, embracing human life as a whole, the melancholy of a mind incessantly tending from the real ([Greek: ta physika]) to the metaphysical ([Greek: ta meta ta physika]), and only brought back by external occasion from the metaphysical to the real. Do not let us quarrel about the words, if we can agree about the thing. Let any competent person whatever read the Sonnets, and then, with their impression on him, pass to the plays, and he will inevitably become aware of Shakespeare's personal fondness for certain themes or trains of thought, particularly that of the speed and destructiveness of time. Death, vicissitude, the march and tramp of generations across life's stage, the rotting of human bodies in the earth--these and all the other forms of the same thought were familiar to Shakespeare to a degree beyond what is to be seen in the case of any other poet. It seems to have been a habit of his mind, when left to its own tendency, ever to indulge by preference in that oldest of human meditations, which is not yet trite: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he cometh forth as a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth as a shadow, and continueth not." Let us cite a few examples from the Sonnets:-- "When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment."-- _Sonnet 15._ "If thou survive my well-contented clay, When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover."-- _Sonnet 32._ "No longer mourn for me when I am dead Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell Give warning to the world that I am fled From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell."-- _Sonnet 71._ "The wrinkles, which thy glass will truly show, Of mouthed graves will give thee memory; Thou by thy dial's shady stealth may'st know Time's thievish progress to eternity."-- _Sonnet 77._ "Or I shall live your epitaph to make, Or you survive when I in earth am rotten."-- _Sonnet 81._