To hearken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be comparéd well
To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.”
It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “Two Gentlemen of Verona;” no matter what: I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.[17] It is enough that he wrote them; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought.
I wonder how much of his own hopes and possible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play:—
“Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live registered upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of Death;
When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time,