to enforce their perusal ! Wordsworth says of the very same Sonnets: that in no part of Shakespeare's writings is there to be found, in an equal compass, a greater number of exquisite feelings felicitously expressed. Who shall decide when doctors disagree? DELINA.—Between two such doctors the choice is not difficult, I should think; and as to their interpretation, why should the Sonnets be judged by a different rule from those of Petrarch and Surrey, of Spenser or Drayton. Meres, who knew of them while still in private circulation, before 1598, in his "Wits' Treasury" calls them "Shakespeare's sugared sonnets among his private friends." That is simple enough. To him with all his knowledge of the man and the period, they were just such detached sonnets, written from time to time under varying emotions and external influences, as those in Spenser's Amoretti, in Daniel's "Delia," or in the "Idea's Mirror" of Drayton. Many of them were written in those earlier years in which he penned his "Venus and Adonis," and other lyrical pieces, before he discovered where his true strength lay. But long afterwards I doubt not he found in many a thoughtful mood: ""Twas pastime to be bound Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground." until at length the whole were collected and printed by Thomas Thorpe,-the T. T. of the involved dedication,—so late as 1609. HARDEN. So far, I am very much of your mind. But who then was Mr. W. H.? Have you found in him the father of Anne Shakespeare, and so the only begetter of her and the sonnets too? A William Hathaway would be a match for any W. H. yet named. DELINA. I do not greatly concern myself about Mr. W. H. He certainly was not the poet's father-in-law; for his name was Richard. "Mr." in those days implied a University graduate: what if the said Mr. W. H.-to whom, be it remembered, the publisher, and not the author, makes his quaint dedication,-was no more than some amateur collector, who had earned the gratitude of Thomas Thorpe, by augmenting Jaggard's meagre collection of "Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Musicke," printed ten years before? Printers and publishers in those old days troubled themselves as little about an author's right to property in his own brainwork, as any Harper or Harpy of the free and enlightened Republic of this nineteenth century. Initials are common on their titlepages. Mr. I. H. prints one edition of the "Venus and Adonis," Mr. R. F. another, Mr. W. B. a third, and Mr. T. P. a fourth. One edition of the "Lucrece" bears the initials I. H., another N.O., a third T. S., and a fourth J. B. Sometimes the mystery lies with the printer, at other times with the publisher. The sonnets of 1609 are "By G. Eld, for T. T., and are to be sold by William Aspley." Why should not the dedication have its share. Everybody who cared to know, could find out who I. H. the printer, or T. T. the publisher was; and probably Mr. W. H. was then no more important, and little less accessible. HARDEN,-It may be so; and this Will o' the Wisp has led us a round, much akin to that of the old bibliomaniacs you refuse to follow : "Through bog, through bush, through brake, What of your promised glimpse of Anne DELINA. Reading them with the idea of an absent husband responding to the regrets of one who deplores that time has her already at a disadvantage, I find a significance cast on many that were before as obscure, though not as barren, to me as they proved to the critical lawyer, George Steevens. Look for example, at the beautiful one beginning: "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end;" and yet he comforts himself that his verse shall live to praise her worth, despite Time's cruel hand. The same idea is repeated in many forms. HARDEN. And by many lovers-though they had not married their grandmothers! DELINA.—If you can but jest, we had better drop the subject. HARDEN. I crave your pardon. I shall try to dismiss altogether from my mind the seven-years disparity between the boy-poet and his bride. Proceed if you please. DELINA. Not, if you are to dismiss from your mind that difference of age; though the sooner you rid your mind of the assumed domestic discord of which it has been made the sole basis, the better. HARDEN. I await your disclosures with unbiased impartiality. DELINA. Disclosures I have none. What can you make of scores of Wordsworth's sonnets, for example, but crystallizations of the poet's passing thoughts. So also is it with those Shakespearian gems. Sometimes they are his own thoughts, at other times he manifestly impersonated others. Let me direct you to one of the latter. I have reI have repeatedly pleased myself with the fancy that Shakespeare penned the twenty-second sonnet as the expression of his absent Anne's feelings; cheering her thus, by putting her own thoughts in verse, when in some despondent hour she has recalled how time with her started unfairly in the race : "My glass shall not persuade me I am old, So long as youth and thou are of one date; But when in thee time's furrows I behold, Then look I death my days should expiate. For all that beauty that doth cover thee, Is but the seemly raiment of my heart, Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me; How can I then be elder than thou art? O, therefore, love, be of thyself so wary, As I not for myself, but for thee will; Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary, As tender nurse her babe from faring ill. Presume not on thy heart when mine is slain; Thou gav'st me thine, not to give back again." HARDEN.-You fancy this sonnet should be headed "Anna Shakespeare loquitur!" DELINA.-It seems to me it might. HARDEN.—And that the poet has himself in view in "all that beauty" he refers to! DELINA.--I suppose him to be only versifying the thoughts of his wife; in fact, rendering one of her letters into a sonnet. HARDEN. An ingenious fancy, certainly; and not worse than some of the older hypotheses you reject. Better indeed than that of William Hart, the nephew, who was not born when some of the sonnets were written; or than William Hughes so ingeniously unearthed by Tyrwhitt out of a sorry pun! And you would find by a like process some definite meaning or other in each of those vague little abstractions. DELINA. Many of them are full of meaning and personal character. Look at the very one that follows: "As an imperfect actor on the stage. Who with his fear is put beside his part." The personality is obvious in the 134th sonnet, where he puns, and sports with his own name. It is no less so in the 111th, where the poet complains of the fortune that forced him into public life; and why not also, when, as in the 97th sonnet, he bewails an absence that made the "summer time" and "the teeming autumn" seem to him like the freezing of old December; or again in the 98th: "From you have I been absent in the Spring, When proud-pied April, dressed in all his train, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything." HARDEN. The story of Shakespeare's unhappy wedded life has been so long current, and so oft repeated, that I confess I have never before fully recognized how entirely it is an inference, or invention of later times. I shall turn a new leaf, and try to read the page on which you throw this novel light. But it will take some schooling before I can hope to reach your enviable state of faith; and without that I fear the sonnets must still remain a riddle. Perhaps I had better betake myself meanwhile to Niebuhr, and cultivate anew my school-boy faith in the loves of Numa Pompilius and the nymph Egeria. MARGUERITE KNELLER, ARTIST AND WOMAN. BY LOUISA MURRAY. SOME CHAPTER I. IN THE LUXEMBOURG. OME years ago, a French painter of high celebrity stopped one day, in his hasty transit through the picture gallery of the Luxembourg, to look at the work of a young girl who was copying one of his own paintings;" Madame Roland before the Convention." At first sight there was nothing remarkable about this girl. She seemed about four and twenty, but she probably looked older than she really was from her sallow complexion, and the still and thoughtful expression of her face. Her features were irregular with no beauty of colouring to redeem their want of harmony, and her dress was as plain and unpretending as her person a grey stuff gown and a black lace handkerchief tied over her black hair formed her costume. Yet, after a glance at her work, the great painter thought her worthy of some attention. He looked at her scrutinizingly for a minute or two; then he turned again to the picture on her easel. "This copy is admirably done, Mademoiselle," he said at last. picture you are now doing so much honour to was painted by me." The young girl started, and dropped her brush. Instead of stooping for it, she looked up at the speaker, who quietly picked it up and handed it to her. Cold and indifferent as she had seemed before, there was neither coldness nor indifference in the look with which she regarded him, as she took it. "It is true, Mademoiselle," he said, smiling at her eager questioning face, “I am Eugene Delacroix, and it is also true that I see in you all the elements of a great painter." A handsome fair-haired young man, himself an art student who had before noticed this girl, and been struck by her peculiarly absorbed look and manner, and evident devotion to her work, was standing near, and saw that these words made her eyes gleam and her face glow. It was not flattered vanity that called forth the unwonted brightness, it was the noble delight of finding her genius recognized by one whom she knew to be a master in her art and whose authority she never dreamt of questioning; a pure and grateful joy such as the timid Neophyte feels when his offering is approved The girl never once looked up. She by the Hierophant of the shrine at which he seemed unmoved by his praise. "It is very nearly, if not quite, equal to the original," continued the great painter. "I even think you have infused a nobler and more characteristic beauty into the heroine's face and figure than you found in your model; and given a simpler and more unconscious grandeur to her air and expression. And I should be something of a judge," he added, with a smile, "for the kneels. Then for a moment, while every feature was illumed by the inward flame "brighter than any light on sea or shore,” the young student thought her beautiful. Whether the great master did or not, he was evidently much interested. He made a few criticisms on her work which the girl received with grateful intelligence, and before he went away he asked her name and residence. She readily gave both, but the "With your permission, Mademoiselle, we shall soon meet again,” said the great painter, "till then I say to you: Courage; a great career is before you." young student, still watching her, could not here," cried Clarie. "See how she looks catch her words. back at that tiresome painting. Take fast hold of her, Mère Monica, and lead her away, or we shall never get her out of this dungeon." And, while she was speaking, she tripped on before, leading the way down the steep stone staircase, more quietly followed by her companions. They passed through the beautiful gardens where the trees were putting forth their first green leaves, and the earliest flowers beginning to open. Children and nurse-maids, soldiers in their uniforms, priests in their robes, students, grisettes, and representatives of nearly all the bourgeois classes of Paris, strolled up and down or sat on the benches. Clarie would have been glad to stay for a while and move among the gay groups that attracted her lively fancy, but Marguerite reminded her that their father would be lonely, and hurried The girl watched his retreating figure for a moment; then she passed her hand across her brow as if to calm her emotions, and turned again to her work. But her hand shook, a mist seemed before her eyes, and while she was still struggling for self-command, she felt a sharp tap on her shoulder, and saw the pale small face of a sprightly girl of fourteen bending over her. "So soon, Clarie," she said with a sigh. "So soon! so late you must mean. But you grow worse and worse. Here you sit painting day after day, week after week, month after month, I believe there is nothing else in the world that you care for. No wonder for Mère Monica to say you make yourself ill. But how fast you are getting on, Marguerite," she exclaimed suddenly. "Thank goodness, it will soon be finished." will "Yes, but my work will not be finished with it, I hope. I have heard something to-day, Clarie, that will make me work harder than ever." "What nonsense! you couldn't work harder than you do. But what have you heard ?" on. Clarie reluctantly followed, and, looking back at some striking costume she had caught sight of as they were descending a flight of steps, her foot slipped, and she fell on the pavement with a sudden cry. "Oh, Clarie, are you hurt?" exclaimed Marguerite, trying to raise her sister with a tenderness which showed there was at least one thing besides her art about which she cared. "Yes, my arm," gasped Clarie. "Oh, don't touch me, Marguerite," she cried, in an accent of great pain; "let me lie here. "I will tell you another time, perhaps. Oh it pains me so much, it must be Now, I am ready to go home." An elderly woman in a picturesque Norman cap and quaint black dress had accompanied Clarie, and now handed Marguerite her shawl. "Not that you need it to-day," she said in a brisk cheerful tone, "the air is so mild it is easy to see that summer is coming even in Paris, and the gardens are almost as sweet as the apple orchards in my oid home. It will do you good to get into them out of this gloomy place." "I don't know how she can bear to spend these bright spring mornings shut up broken." Marguerite turned white with terror, and Mère Monica wrung her hands in agony. Some passers-by stopped, but before any one else could offer assistance, the young student who had seen them in the Luxembourg, and who had followed them through the gardens, came forward. "There is a surgeon living close by," he said to Marguerite, "let me carry Mademoiselle there. I will not hurt you,” he said to the poor child, who was moaning piteously, "I will carry you very gently." |