Shakespeare was more or less separated from his wife for a number
of years, cannot indeed be questioned; but that he ever found or ever
sought relief or comfort in such separation, is what we have no
warrant for believing. It was simply forced upon him by the
necessities of his condition. The darling object of his London life
evidently was, that he might return to his native town, with a
handsome competence, and dwell in the bosom of his family; and the
yearly visits, which tradition reports him to have made to Stratford,
look like any thing but a wish to forget them or be forgotten by them.
From what is known of his subsequent life, it is certain that he had,
in large measure, that honourable ambition, so natural to an English
gentleman, of being the founder of a family; and as soon as he had
reached the hope of doing so, he retired to his old home, and there
set up his rest, as if his best sunshine of life still waited on the
presence of her from whose society he is alleged to have fled away in
disappointment and disgust.

To Anne Hathaway, I have little doubt, were addressed, in his early
morn of love, three sonnets playing on the author's name, which are
hardly good enough to have been his work at any time; certainly none
too good to have been the work of his boyhood. And I have met with no
conjecture on the point that bears greater likelihoods of truth, than
that another three, far different in merit, were addressed, much later
in life, to the same object. The prevailing tone and imagery of them
are such as he would hardly have used but with a woman in his
thoughts; they are full-fraught with deep personal feeling, as
distinguished from exercises of fancy; and they speak, with
unsurpassable tenderness, of frequent absences, such as, before the
Sonnets were printed, the Poet had experienced from his wife. I feel
morally certain that she was the inspirer of them. I can quote but a
part of them:

"How like a Winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere!
For Summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute.

"From you I have been absent in the Spring,
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him:
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sw