"If only chains and bands can make me blest, No marvel if alone and bare I go An armed knight's captive and slave confessed." (_J. A. Symonds_.) In other sonnets the tone is no less passionate than Shakespeare's --take, for example, the twenty-second:-- "More tenderly perchance than is my due, Your spirit sees into my heart, where rise The flames of holy worship, nor denies The grace reserved for those who humbly sue. Oh blessed day when you at last are mine! Let time stand still, and let noon's chariot stay; Fixed be that moment on the dial of heaven! That I may clasp and keep, by grace divine-- Clasp in these yearning arms and keep for aye My heart's loved lord to me desertless given."[5] (_J. A. Symonds_.) In comparison with Cavalieri, Michael Angelo could with justice call himself old. Some critics, on the other hand, have seen in the fact that Shakespeare was not really old at the time when the Sonnets were written, a proof of their conventional and unreal character. But this is to overlook the relativity of the term. As compared with a youth of eighteen, Shakespeare was in effect old, with his sixteen additional years and all his experience of life. And if we are right in assigning Sonnets lxiii. and lxxiii. to the year 1600 or 1601, Shakespeare had then reached the age of thirty-seven, an age at which (among his contemporaries) Drayton in his _Idea_ dwells quite in the same spirit upon the wrinkles of age in his face, and at which, as Tyler has very aptly pointed out, Byron in his swan-song uses expressions about himself which might have been copied from Shakespeare's seventy-third Sonnet. Shakespeare says:-- "That time of year thou mayst in me behold When _yellow leaves_, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." Byron thus expresses himself:-- "My days are in _the yellow leaf_,[6] The flowers and fruits of love are gone, The worm, the canker and the grief Are mine alone." In Shakespeare we read:-- "In me thou seest _the glowing of such fire_ That on the ashes of his youth doth lie As the _death-bed_ whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by." Byron's words are:-- "_The fire that on my bosom preys_ Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze-- _A funeral pile_" Thus both poets liken themselves, at this comparatively early age, to the wintry woods with their yellowing leaves, and without blossom, fruit, or the song of birds; and both compare the fire which still glows in their soul to a solitary flame which finds no nourishment from without. The ashes of my youth become its death-bed, says Shakespeare. They are a funeral pile, says Byron.