I pledge my sword, my person and my honour
On the Great Seal of England: so farewell.
Swift to your charges: nought was ever done
Unless at some time it were first begun.
This also is Shakespeare in his repose, but a better Shakespeare than he whom the Professor would challenge. For though there is here no work or strain in the thing, yet it reeks of English. It is like the mist over our valleys at evening, so effortless is it and so reposeful, and yet so native. Note the climax “On the Great Seal of England” and the quaint, characteristic folk-lore of the concluding couplet, with its rhyming effect. Note also how sparing is William Shakespeare of the strong qualificative, however just it may be. For when our moderns will speak hardly of “the tolerant kine” or “the under-lit sky,” or of “the creeping river like a worm upturned, with silver belly stiffened in the grass,” though they be by all this infinitely stronger, yet are they but the more condensed and self-belittled. Shakespeare will write you ten lines and have in all but one just and sharp adjective—“stiff-set;” for the rest they are a common highway; he cares not.
And here he is in the by-paths; a meadow of Poesy. I have found it hidden away in one of the latter plays; the flowers of his decline:—
“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Now thine earthly task is done,
Thou’rt gone home and ta’en thy wages.