['My love,'—wait till you know what it is, and do not think to know with the first or second reading of poems, that are on the surface of them scholastic, academic, mystical, obtrusively enigmatical. Perhaps, after all, it is that Eros who was enfranchised, emancipated.]
'But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest [thou owes!],
Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to—thee!
But here is our prophecy, which we have undertaken to read with the aid of this collation:—
'When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry;
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death, and all oblivious enmity,
Shall YOU pace forth. Your praise shall still find room,
Even in the eyes [collateral sounds] of all posterity,
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the JUDGMENT that YOURSELF arise [till then],
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.'
See the passages at the commencement of this chapter, if there be any doubt as to this reading.
'In lover's eyes.'
Leonatus Posthumus. Shall's have a Play of this? Thou scornful Page, There lie thy part. [To Imogen disguised as Fidele.]
The consideration which qualified, in the mind of the Author of the Advancement of Learning, the great difficulty which the question of civil government presented at that time, is the key to this 'plot.' For men, and not 'Romans' only, 'are like sheep;' and if you can but get some few to go right, the rest will follow. That was the plan. To create a better leadership of men,—to form a new order and union of men,—a new nobility of men, acquainted with the doctrine of their own nature, and in league for its advancement, to seize the 'thoughts' of those whose law is the law of the larger activity, and 'inform them with nobleness,'—was the plan.
For these the inner school was opened; for these its ascending platforms were erected. For these that 'closet' and 'cabinet,' where the 'simples' of the Shake-spear philosophy are all locked and labelled, was built. For these that secret 'cabinet of the Muses,' where the Delphic motto is cut anew, throws out its secret lures,—its gay, many-coloured, deceiving lures,—its secret labyrinthine clues,—for all lines in this building meet in that centre. All clues here unwind to that. For these—for the minds on whom the continuation of this enterprise was by will devolved, the key to that cabinet—the historical key to its inmost compartment of philosophic mysteries, was carefully laboured and left,—pointed to—pointed to with immortal gesticulations, and left ('What I cannot speak, I point out with my finger'); the key to that 'Verulamian cabinet,' which we shall hear of when the fictitious correspondence in which the more secret history of this time was written, comes to be opened. That cabinet where the subtle argument that was inserted in the Poem or the Play, but buried there in its gorgeous drapery, is laid bare in prose as subtle ('I here scatter it up and down indifferently for verse'); where the new truth that was spoken in jest, as well as in parables, to those who were without, is unfolded,—that truth which moved unseen amid the gambols of the masque,—preferring to raise questions rather than objections,—which stalked in, without suspicion, in 'the hobby-horse' of the clown,—which the laugh of the groundlings was so often in requisition to cover,—that 'to beguile the time looked like the time,'—that 'looked like the flower, and was the serpent under it.'
For these that secret place of confidential communication was provided, where 'the argument' of all these Plays is opened without respect to the 'offence in it,'—to its utmost reach of abstruseness and subtlety—in its utmost reach of departure from 'the road of common opinion,'—where the Elizabethan secrets of Morality, and Policy and Religion, which made the Parables of the New Doctrine, are unrolled, at last, in all the new, artistic glories of that 'wrapped up' intention. This is the second use of the Fable in which we resume that dropped argument,—dropped for that time, while Caesar still commanded his thirty legions; and when the question, 'How long to philosophise?' being started in the schools again, the answer returned still was, 'Until our armies cease to be commanded by fools.' This is that second use of the Fable where we find the moral of it at last,—that moral which our moralists have missed in it,—that moral which is not 'vulgar and common-place,' but abstruse, and out of the road of common opinion,—that moral in which the Moral Science, which is the Wisdom of the Moderns, lurks.