That Lord Southampton is the subject of the first fifty-five Sonnets is sufficiently clear; and some of these are perfectly beautiful,—as the 30th, 32d, 41st, 54th. There are others scattered through the rest of the volume, on the same subject; but there are many which admit of no such interpretation, and are without doubt inspired by the real object of a real passion, of whom nothing can be discovered, but that she was dark-eyed[96] and dark-haired,[96] that she excelled in music;[97] and that she was one of a class of females who do not always, in losing all right to our respect, lose also their claim to the admiration of the sex who wronged them, or the compassion of the gentler part of their own, who have rejected them. This is so clear from various passages, that unhappily there can be no doubt of it.[98] He has flung over her, designedly it should seem, a veil of immortal texture and fadeless hues, "branched and embroidered like the painted Spring," but almost impenetrable even to our imagination. There are few allusions to her personal beauty, which can in any way individualise her, but bursts of deep and passionate feeling, and eloquent reproach, and contending emotions, which show, that if she could awaken as much love and impart as much happiness as woman ever inspired or bestowed, he endured on her account all the pangs of agony, and shame, and jealousy;—that our Shakspeare,—he who, in the omnipotence of genius, wielded the two worlds of reality and imagination in either hand, who was in conception and in act scarce less than a God, was in passion and suffering not more than Man.
Instead of any elaborate description of her person, we have, in the only sonnet which sets forth her charms, the rich materials of a picture, rather than the picture itself.
The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my Love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells,
In my Love's veins thou hast too grossly dy'd.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair:
A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both,
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
But sweet, or colour, it had stolen from thee.
He intimates that he found a rival in one of his own most intimate friends, who was also a poet.[99] He laments her absence in this exquisite strain;—
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
....*....*....*....*
For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute!
He dwells with complacency on her supposed truth and tenderness, her bounty, like Juliet's, "boundless as the sea, her love as deep."
Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,
Still constant in a wondrous excellence.