These are but one or two out of many such passages occurring in the Sonnets. Indeed, it may be said that, whenever Shakespeare pronounces the words time, age, death, and the like, it is with a deep and cutting personal emphasis, quite different from the usual manner of poets in their stereotyped allusions to mortality. Time, in particular, seems to have tenanted his imagination as a kind of grim and hideous personal existence, cruel out of mere malevolence of nature. Death, too, had become to him a kind of actual being or fury, morally unamiable, and deserving of reproach: "that churl Death." If we turn to the plays of Shakespeare, we shall find that in them too the same morbid sensitiveness to all associations with mortality is continually breaking out. The vividness, for example, with which Juliet describes the interior of a charnel-house partakes of a spirit of revenge, as if Shakespeare were retaliating, through her, upon an object horrible to himself:-- "Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house, O'ercovered quite with dead men's rattling bones, With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls." More distinctly revengeful is Romeo's ejaculation at the tomb:-- "Thou détestable maw, thou womb of Death, Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth, Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open!" And who does not remember the famous passage in _Measure for Measure_?-- "_Claudio._ Death is a fearful thing. _Isabella._ And shamed life is hateful. _Claudio._ Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment, Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of Death." Again in the grave-digging scene in _Hamlet_ we see the same fascinated familiarity of the imagination with all that pertains to churchyards, coffins, and the corruption within them. "_Hamlet._ Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing. _Horatio._ What's that, my lord? _Hamlet._ Dost thou think Alexander looked o' this fashion i' the earth? _Horatio._ E'en so. _Hamlet._ And smelt so? pah! (_Puts down the skull._) _Horatio._ E'en so, my lord! _Hamlet._ To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?