There can be no reasonable doubt that in the early days of his relation with the well-born mistress, Shakespeare felt himself a favourite of fortune, intoxicated with love and happiness, exalted above his station, honoured and enriched. She must at first have been to him what Maria Fiammetta, the natural daughter of a king, was to Boccaccio. She must have brought a breath from a higher world, an aroma of aristocratic womanhood, into his life. He must have admired her wit, her presence of mind and her daring, her capricious fancy and her quickness of retort. He must have studied, enjoyed, and adored in her--and that in the closest intimacy--the well-bred ease, the sportive coquetry, the security, elegance, and gaiety of the emancipated lady. Who can tell how much of her personality has been transferred to his brilliant young Beatrices and Rosalinds? First and foremost he must have owed to her the rapture of feeling his vitality intensified--a main element in the happiness which, in the first years of their communion, finds expression in the sparkling love-comedies we have just reviewed. Let it not be objected that the Sonnets do not dwell upon this happiness. The Sonnets date from the period of storm and stress, when he had ascertained what at first, no doubt, he had but vaguely suspected, that his mistress had ensnared his friend; and in composing them he no doubt antedated many of the passionate and distracted unoods which overwhelmed him at the crisis, when he not only realised the fact of their intrigue, but saw it dragged to the light of day. He then felt as though, doubly betrayed, he had irrevocably lost them both. Thus the picture of his mistress drawn in the Sonnets shows her, not as she appeared to him in earlier years, but as he saw her during this later period. Yet he also depicts moments, and even hours, when his whole nature must have been lapped in tenderness and harmony. The scene, for instance, so melodiously portrayed in Sonnet cxxviii. is steeped in an atmosphere of happy love--the scene in which, seated at the virginals, the lady, whom the poet addresses as "my music," lets her delicate aristocratic fingers wander over the keys, enchanting with their concord the listener who longs to press her fingers and her lips to his. He envies the keys that "kiss the tender inward of her hand," and concludes:-- "Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss." It is only natural, however, that the morbidly passionate, complaining, and accusing Sonnets should be in the majority. Again and again he reverts to her faithlessness and laxity of conduct. In Sonnet cxxxvii. he speaks of his love as "anchored in the bay where all men ride." Sonnet cxxxviii. begins:-- "When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies." And in Sonnet clii. he reproaches himself with having sworn a host of false oaths in swearing to her good qualities:--