THE SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume VIII, Issue 531, 5 December 1857, Page 4

THE SONNETS OF SHAKESPEARE.

The inevitable fault (says an eloquent writer in the ' Westminister Review/) of most autobiographies is that they gloss over their own defects; their vices and not their virtues they " write in water;" their good manners, and not their evil ones " live in brass." Try it. reader, for one half hour; write your own history, and you shall have to tell, if you write but the truth, of broken vows, of obligations ill-acquitted, duties badly performed;— write on, for you are already stopping; that secretary conscience shall whisper to you, perhaps, of your avarice, your meanness, your vanity, your pride, till the catalogue is swollen so fearfully that you shall rise terror-stricken and burn your manuscript. .. Yet this is what Shakespeare has done, and not burned the manuscript. These sonnets, therefore, must be looked upon as no common autobiographical poem. They-are rather confessions; — confessions such as men make on bended knee in the .privacy of their thoughts; confessions, such as they think but One besides themselves can hear. Let us therefore approach this shrine of the poet's conscience with all reverence. Let us not' trample dpwix these sacred" musings with, vulgar impertinence. We know of nothing like them, save the Psalms of David; light and shade alternate in them as in that grand old Hebrew poetry. Close beside one another are paean and dirge, ■ love-songs, and prayers, for death itself to relieve the weary soul. Ah! sad and strange is this conflict of the soul and flesh. A brave man struggling against fate was thought bj the Greek of old to be a sight worthy of the gods; and here we may see the struggles that the greatest man who ever lived went through — struggles against doubt — struggles against temptation — struggles, against nimself. The dramas alone would have told us how deeply their author must have thought on all the great questions of life and death; but they are, after all, hut mere windows and loopholes through which we can catch a glimpse of him. Here, in these sonnets, we see him face to face. .We see how theman,whopourtrayed those It,was of Romeo and Juliet, himself really loved,—how he, who drew the scepticism of- Hamlet, himself also doubted—how he, wlii could paint the trials of Mend desert* -d by friend, of Helena forgotten by Heri\ma, and Lear cast off by his daughters, i^elt when also deserted and forgotten, la the, drasaas we can take no dimensions of him'; though he is never "distantin humanity," yet he is still far above all our powers of gauging him; but in the sonnets ;he is close to us,—the man tried by the si^me trials as ourselves, passing through -the same ordeal of pain as ourselves, experiencing the same joy.. The dcamas are, as it were his monument which v^e gazs at from afar; these sonnets the miniature wjiich we can hang around our necks, and wear close to our bosom. i