His Life and Genius 161 



owing partly to his low station, partly also appar- 

 ently to some darkly hinted imputation on his 

 name which made it impossible for the latter 

 openly to acknowledge their intimacy — 



I may not evermore acknowledge thee 

 Lest my bewailed guilt should do thee shame, 

 Nor thou with public kindness honour me, 

 Unless thou take that honour from thy name. 



However that be, he was certainly sometimes 

 oppressed with moods of melancholy, deepening 

 at worst into almost dismal despair, else why, 

 brooding darkly on the wrongs in the world — on 

 " desert a beggar born," on " purest faith un- 

 happily forsworn," on " maiden virtue rudely 

 strumpeted," on "gilded honour shamefully mis- 

 placed," on vi simple truth miscalled simplicity " — 

 should he have called out for " restful death ? " 

 why spoken of having drunk potions of Siren tears 

 distilled from limbecks foul as hell within ? why 

 even hinted at the quick ending of his life as 



The coward conquest of a wretch's knife 

 Too base of thee to be remembered ?* 



* Not that he there probably hinted at suicide, as has been 

 suspected. If perchance that were so, he no doubt soon eased 

 himself of his moody thoughts, either by spending their energy 

 in active work of some sort, or by bodying them forth in a 

 sonnet, just as Goethe delivered himself from like gloomy 

 thoughts by writing the Sorrows of Werther. The feeling lines 

 really express his sense of the insignificance of the bodily life 

 compared with that of the spirit, the better part of him, and 

 of the easy and base means by which in a moment, in the 

 twinkling of an eye, its poor being might be ended. Still, in 



II 



