is the sun after it has climbed the
morning steep and is journeying on the level heaven toward the zenith.
Certainly that must indicate that his friend was advanced toward the
middle arch of life.

Sonnet II. reads as follows:

When _forty_ winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then, being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.

* * * * *

This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

These lines indicate that his friend had not yet reached forty years.
And equally do they indicate that in the mind of the poet the fortieth
year was not in the ascending scale of life, but was at, or perhaps
beyond, the "highmost pitch" toward which, in the seventh Sonnet, he
described his friend as approaching.[9]

Taking these seventeen Sonnets together, reading and re-reading them,
can we suppose that they were composed by the great delineator, of or
toward a person under or much below thirty? They imply that the person
addressed was not so far below middle life that a statement of the
decadence that would come after his fortieth year presented a remote
or far-off picture. Besides, if his friend was below thirty years,
while it might be well to urge him to marry, hardly would the poet
have used language implying that his marrying days were waning. To
put it roughly, there would not be so much of the now-or-never thought
running through the ornate verse in which the poet voices his appeal.

As we read these seventeen Sonnets, we may perhaps suspect that the
desire that his friend shall marry is so strongly stated and
presented, because it is a theme around which the poet can
appropriately weave so much of compliment and expressions of
admiration and affection. But if that be so, must we not still believe
that the great dramatist could not have addressed them to his friend,
unless in substance and in all their more delicate shades of meaning
and of coloring they were appropriate to him?

We may now pass from this first group to other Sonnets which convey
similar and, I submit, unmistakable intimations as to the age of the
poet's friend or patron.

Sonnet C., especially wh