's apprentice years and the young
poet shows plainly that he was moved by both.

If all this be true, then the Herbert-Fitton theory falls to the ground,
for in 1597 Herbert was only seventeen. But unquestionably the sonnets
are autobiographical. They reveal with a poignant power Shakespeare's
sympathy, his unique ability to enter into another personality, his
capacity of imaginative expansion to include the lives of others.
Compare the noble sonnet 112, which Collin translates:

Din kjaerlighed og medynk daekker til
det ar, som sladderen paa min pande trykket.
Lad andre tro og sige, hvad de vil,--
du kjaerlig mine feil med fortrin smykket.

Du er mit verdensalt, og fra din mund
jeg henter al min skam og al min aere.
For andre er jeg dod fra denne stund,
og de for mig som skygger blot skal vaere.

I avgrunds dyp jeg al bekymring kaster!
for andres rost min horesans er slov.
Hvadenten de mig roser eller laster,
jeg som en hugorm er og vorder dov.

Saa helt du fylder ut min sjael herinde,
at hele verden synes at forsvinde.

At this point the article in _Samtiden_ closes. Collin promises to give
in a later number, a metrical translation of a number of significant
sonnets. The promised renderings, however, never appeared. Thirteen
years later, in 1914, the author, in a most interesting and illuminating
book, _Det Geniale Menneske_,[21] a study of "genius" and its relation
to civilization, reprinted his essay in _Samtiden_ and supplemented it
with three short chapters. In the first of these he endeavors to show
that in the sonnets Shakespeare gives expression to two distinct
tendencies of the Renaissance--the tendency toward a loose and
unregulated gratification of the senses, and the tendency toward an
elevated and platonic conception of friendship. Shakespeare sought in
both of these a compensation for his own disastrous love affair and
marriage. But the healing that either could give was at best transitory.
There remained to him as a poet of genius one resource. He could gratify
his own burning desire for a pure and unselfish love by living in his
mighty imagination the lives of his characters. "He who in his yearning
for the highest joys of love had been compelled to abandon hope, found
a joy mingled with pain, in giving of his life to lovers in whom the
longing of William Shakespeare lives for all time.

"He has loved and been loved. It was he whom Sylvia, Hermia, Titania,
Portia,