them, assisted by an occasional reference; this
explanation of them being simply a record of the impressions they have
produced upon an unbiased mind reading them as one would read any other
poetry of the same character.

The story unfolded by the Sonnets, then, is this: Shakespeare had an
ardent friendship, made all the livelier by the fervor of the poetic
temperament, for a young man of noble birth and very great personal
beauty, himself a lover of poetry, if not a poet. This youth was very
much younger than Shakespeare, who was already beginning to speak of
himself as past the prime of life, although he was probably not more
than thirty-four. The friend of Shakespeare was almost perfect in
beauty, intellect and disposition, but he had two faults: he was
extremely fond of flattery (Sonnet 84), and he was over-addicted to
pleasure:

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name! (95.)

Shakespeare scorned to palter with the truth--"fair, kind and true" he
had called his friend--but he saw his faults with the keen eye of love,
that cannot bear an imperfection in the one who should be all-perfect.

Thou truly fair wert truly sympathized
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend; (82.)

and

I love thee in such sort,
As, thou being mine, mine is thy good report; (36.)

therefore in all love he warns him to take heed.

Such was the character of Shakespeare's friend, to whom he begins by
addressing seventeen sonnets (or poems in the sonnet stanza, which is
the better definition), urging him to marry. He knows the weakness of
his character and the temptations that beset him, and in a strain of
loving persuasion, whose theme bears great resemblance to many passages
in Sidney's _Arcadia_, he beseeches him, now that he stands upon the top
of happy hours,

Make thee another self for love of me.
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

Sonnet 17 in a most beautiful manner sums up the argument and ends the
subject.

The Sonnets from the 18th to the 126th are all addressed to this beloved
friend, who nevertheless, early in the history of their
friendship, inflicted upon the poet a cruel wrong. With the 33d Sonnet
begin the references to this double treachery. It is impossible for an
unprejudiced reader to interpret this and the other poems upon the same
subject