1 8o Shakspeare 



brief bliss, and the sequent hated woe of lust in 



action — 



Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight ; 

 Past reason hunted ; and no sooner had 

 Past reason-hated, as a swallowed bait, 

 On purpose laid to make the taker mad ; 

 Mad in pursuit and in possession so ; 

 Had, having, and in quest to have extreme, 

 A bliss in proof, and proved a very woe ; 

 Before a joy proposed behind a dream. 



No one has depicted the alternating joys and 

 pains of lustful love, its blissful now and hateful 

 then so forcibly, with compressed energy of feel- 

 ing and words, because no one, having felt them, 

 had such power to body forth his experience, and 

 convert tears of remorseful memory into gems of 

 matchless art. On the other hand, no one has 

 insisted elsewhere with more delicate feeling on 

 the contrast between the tender grace of pure 

 love with its refined joys and the coarse passion 

 of bestial lust with its loathed satiety : the one as 

 gentle as the soft lighting of a seagull on its 

 cradling wave, the other as coarse as the plunging 

 splash of a tame duck on to a weedy pond. 



Studying the sonnets critically and candidly 

 without preconceived notions of something mys- 

 terious or mystic which they must obscurely mean 

 and wilful blindness to that which they plainly 

 say — or with an indolent content to enjoy them 

 diffusely as word-melodies without caring to dis- 

 cover the least meaning in them — they disclose 

 a deep wading through dirty waters at one period 



