writer had "put on," or attempted to use, what he calls "nature's power,”—the same explanation for the same fact being referred to in the last line of the 69th Sonnet, where he says that "him," meaning the spirit, or spirit side of nature, or nature's power, had grown common; or, in other words again, that every common writer, in his time, was attempting to use nature's power; which was, in fact, no other than the object of his own passion-the Master-Mistress of the 20th Sonnet being an expression for nature, seen in her beauty and power, under the figurative expression of Beauty's Rose: for it is designated by many words, as we read in Sonnet 105.

We lose the characteristics of the universal when we put limitations upon it and define it as having this or that significance exclusively, expressed by the sense of any one word. The Rose is true, or truth; it is also the beautiful and the good; and it is power no less it was to the poet all in all, as we read in the 109th Sonnet :

109. Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood,
That I could so preposterously be stained,

To leave for nothing all thy sum of good;

For nothing this wide universe I call,

Save thou, my Rose; in it thou art my all.

We return now to the 67th Sonnet, and observe that the language, “O, him she stores," &c., refers to the spirit of Beauty, as being "stored" by nature in its own unparticipated simplicity, which evinced to the poet, who saw it in that simplicity, the wealth she had long before his own age, the poet looking at the past through a historic vision; and then follows Sonnet 68 (the explanation of which is the immediate object of this chapter):

67. Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, &c.

which signifies that the poet saw, in the history of the past, what he calls the "cheek or outside of that beauty which was the object of his own passion; and that beauty he saw in nature, not as she is visible which is but the cheek of nature, but as she is conceived in her spirit; and that spirit the poet calls, in line 9, Sonnet 69, the Beauty of Mind.

In the 69th Sonnet, however, the poet acknowl

edges or affirms the beauty and perfection of nature, both as visible and invisible, when seen in and for itself simply, his complaint being that it was looked at in what he calls "guess;" whereas, as he tells us in Sonnet 84, it is only necessary to be simply true; urging that nature should be shown to be just what she is, without "bastard" attempts at embellishment by robbing "golden fleeces" from a dead antiquity, which he calls, in Sonnet 127, "fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face."

"He that writes of you," says our poet, addressing the spirit of beauty, or the spirit of nature, "let him but copy what in you is writ, not making worse what nature made so clear, and such a counterpart shall fame his wit," &c., and this, in our poet's view, was what he calls, in Hamlet, "holding the mirror up to nature."

This is also the theme of the 83d Sonnet :

83. I never saw that you did painting need, &c.

which the poet might have had in mind when he exclaimed, "Who can paint the lily, or throw a perfume on the violet," &c.

In short, the poet himself was his "mother's glass (Sonnet 3), and she in him "called back the lovely

April of her prime," where she saw, or enables us to see, “beauty's summer," as revived in our poet.

The poet of the Sonnets, we repeat, did not address a person in those wonderful productions, but gave expression, in a series of monologues, to his own contemplations upon nature, as seen in the spirit of “beauty, truth, and rarity."

CHAPTER IX.

THE 142d Sonnet has been pointed out as especially difficult of interpretation; but it falls very decidedly within the scope of the author's theory.

142. Love is my sin, &c.

In order to explain the meaning of this Sonnet, we again refer to the 87th Sonnet, beginning:

87. Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, &c.

which closes with the lines:

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter

In sleep a king, but, waking, no such matter.

If the reader will but look into the poets, he will find, with nearly all of them, certainly the best of them, abundant reason to understand that the divine afflatus, or poetic gift, however "constant " in itself,