Beggar'd of blood to blush through lively veins?
For she hath no exchequer now but HIS,
And proud of many, lives upon HIS gains.
O, HIM she stores, to show what wealth she had,
In days long since, before these last so bad."
Son. 67.
The subsequent sonnets, likewise, as far as the hundred and twenty-seventh, which appear to have been written at various periods anterior to 1609, not only bear the strongest additional testimony to the mascularity of the person addressed, but in several instances clearly evince the nature of the affection borne to him, which without any doubt consisted solely of ardent friendship and intellectual adoration. Two entire sonnets, indeed, are dedicated to the expression of these sentiments, in the first of which he tells his noble patron, that he had absorbed in his own person all the friendship which he (Shakspeare) had ever borne to the living or the dead, and he finely terms this attachment "religious love." In thy bosom he exclaims—
"—— there reigns love and all love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buried.
How many a holy and obsequious tear