"The current, that with gentle murmur glides, Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage; But, when his fair course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with the enamell'd stones, Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh in his pilgrimage. . . . . . . . . I'll be as patient as a gentle stream, And make a pastime of each weary step, Till the last step have brought me to my love; And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil, A blessed soul doth in Elysium." And although the men are here of inferior interest to the women, we yet find in the mouth of Valentine outbursts of great lyric beauty. For example (iii. I):-- "Except I be by Silvia in the night, There is no music in the nightingale; Unless I look on Silvia in the day, There is no day for me to look upon. She is my essence; and I leave to be, If I be not by her fair influence Foster'd, illumin'd, cherish'd, kept alive." Besides the strains of passion and of gaiety in this light acting play, a third note is clearly struck, the note of nature. There is fresh air in it, a first breath of those fragrant midland memories which prove that this child of the country must many a time have said to himself with Valentine (v. 4):-- "How use doth breed a habit in a man! This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods, I better brook than nourishing peopled towns." In many passages of this play we are conscious for the first time of that keen love of nature which never afterwards deserts Shakespeare, and which gives to some of the most mannered of his early efforts, as, for example, to his short narrative poems, their chief interest and value. [1] _The Shepherdess Felismena_ in Hazlitt's _Shakespeare's Library_, Pt. I. vol. i. ed. 1875. XI _VENUS AND ADONIS: DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE--THE RAPE OF LUCRECE: RELATION TO PAINTING_ Although Shakespeare did not publish _Venus and Adonis_ until the spring of 1593, when he was twenty-nine years old, the poem must certainly have been conceived, and probably written, several years earlier. In dedicating it to the Earl of Southampton, then a youth of twenty, he calls it "the first heire of my invention;" but it by no means follows that it is literally the first thing he ever wrote. The expression may merely imply that his work for the theatre was not regarded as an independent exercise of his poetic talent. But the over-luxuriant style betrays the youthful hand, and we place it, therefore, among Shakespeare's writings of about 1590-91.