That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me I was bold
To trust those tables that receive thee more.
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me."

We next come to a singular passage in this friendship, — an injury and quarrel of a most painful and trying character, a forgiveness and reconciliation which reveal a surpassing magnanimity of love. The history of this passage throws an interesting light on Othello's terrible outbreaks of invective against Desdemona, from the personal experience of Shakespeare. He was accustomed to reside a portion of the year at Stratford. It seems that during his absence, here or elsewhere, his mistress, smitten with the beauty and wit of Herbert, succeeded in winning him to her arms. Shakespeare discovered the treachery, and was plunged into the deepest distress. He bitterly denounces the woman.

"Beshrew that heart that makes my heart to groan,
For that deep wound it gives my friend and me!

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Is 't not enough to torture me alone,

But slave to slavery my sweet'st friend must be ?
Me from myself thy cruel eye hath taken,
And my next self thou harder hast engrossed;
Of him, myself, and thee, I am forsaken;

A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed."

'My better angel is a man right fair,
My worser spirit a woman colored ill;
To win me soon to hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride."

In the Sonnet beginning,

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action,"

he inveighs against sensual vice in a strain of earnest power, which unmasks all its degradation with an edge of truth as energetic and contemptuous as that of the speech of the Duke to Jacques in "As You Like It."

He upbraids his friend with mingled severity and forbearance, a deep sense of wrong and magnanimous palliation and yearning.

"What potions have I drank of siren tears
Distilled from limbecs foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!"
"That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that touches me more nearly."

He makes excuses for him even while blaming.
"Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won,
Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assailed;
And when a woman wooes, what woman's son
Will sourly leave her till she have prevailed ?
Ah me! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear,
And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth
Who lead thee in their riot even there

Where thou art forced to break a double truth."

Was ever an injury so gorgeously depicted, so sublimely excused, as, in the following verses, the one inflicted by Herbert on Shakespeare?

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out! alack! he was but one hour mine;

The region cloud hath masked him from me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth."

With what pathetic depth of feeling he complains, relents, and resigns himself, in the next piece!

"Take all my loves, my Love, yea, take them all :
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my Love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty:
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief

To bear love's wrong than hate's known injury.
Lascivious grace! in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes."

Again the struggle of resentment and love breaks forth, and through the splendid imagery we can see the traces of suffering.

"Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,

And make me travel forth without my cloak,

To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,
Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,
To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face:

For no man well of such a salve can speak
That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace.
Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;
Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss;
The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief
To him that bears the strong offence's cross.

Ah! but those tears are pearls which thy love sheds,
And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds."

Herbert appears to have soon repented with sincere shame, made overtures to his aggrieved friend,

"and tendered

That humble salve which wounded bosoms fits."

Shakespeare generously writes to him,

"No more be grieved at that which thou hast done;
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud,
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,

Thy sins excusing more than thy sins are."

Their former love is restored in more than its original ful

ness.

"That you were once unkind befriends me now,

And for that sorrow which I then did feel
Needs must I under my transgression bow,
Unless my nerves were brass or hammered steel.
For if you were by my unkindness shaken,
As I by yours, you've passed a hell of time;
And I, a tyrant, have no leisure taken
To weigh how once I suffered in your crime."

"O benefit of ill! now I find true

That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater."

In the later ripeness of their friendship, Herbert complained that his friend had ceased to write to him as in the earlier stages of their intercourse. Shakespeare explains and excuses his silence thus:

"My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming;
I love not less, though less the show appear;
That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops his pipe in growth of riper days:
Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burthens every bough,

And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.
Therefore, like her, I sometimes hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song."

Shakespeare, in his modesty, and in the felt disparity of his performance to his idea and aspiration, undervalued his own productions. But Herbert admiringly applauded and cherished them, and scorned to care what the fashionable world might think of the incompatibility of an equal friendship between a peerless earl and a despised player. In a mood of melancholy presentiment, the poet, foreseeing that after his death some persons will task his noble friend to recite what merit he had seen in him to love so much, says:

"O, lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,

And so should you, to love things nothing worth."

One more quotation and strangely lofty and plaintive is its strain, as if a snatch of melody, wailed over some angel's hearse in the hall of heaven, had wandered down to mortal ears must suffice. The conceptions of Prospero, Hamlet, and Lear, stirring all the depths of affection and wonder as VOL. LXXIII. 5TH S. VOL. XI. NO. III.

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they do, evoke and fix upon their author our personal love and admiration in a fainter degree than the unmatched disinterestedness, the divine humanity of these lines:

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly, sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell.
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it: for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay;

Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone."

It cannot but be regretted that no record of this friendship on the part of Pembroke exists from his own pen: though the omission is not mysterious, but natural, since it is not customary for men, save those like a Goethe, in whom the literary propensity is predominant, to write the history of their affections. We know not how he bore the death of his immortal companion, whether he attended his funeral, or paid any other tribute to his memory besides accepting the dedication of his plays. He survived that event fourteen years, and died instantly in the night, of apoplexy, - a sudden rush of blood into the rich chambers of the brain where lived so many of Shakespeare's thoughts, and perchance so many thoughts of Shakespeare. A melancholy tradition in the Pembroke family relates that, when an incision was made in his side for the purpose of embalming, the right arm rose in gesture of deprecation.

And here ends the story of the friendship recounted in the Sonnets of Shakespeare, though the portions brought forward only hint the riches contained in the rest. The contemptuous estimate of them once current is no longer possible; but the final verdict of the world on their merits will furnish as striking a contrast to that now popular, as is already afforded by a comparison of the rank now assigned by mankind to the intellectual and moral quality of his plays with that assigned by Hume and Voltaire, when the former said, "Born in a rude age, without any instruction either from