How he outruns the wind, and with what care
He cranks and crosses, with a thousand doubles :
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes."

Mr. Ayton thus goes on:

*

"The hounds, whom we left in full cry, continue their music without remission as long as they are faithful to the scent; as a summons, it should seem, like the seaman's cry, to pull together, or keep together, and it is a certain proof to themselves and their followers that they are in the right way. On the instant that they are "at fault," or lose the scent, they are silent. The weather, in its impression on the scent, is the great father of "faults," but they may arise from other accidents, even when the day is in every respect favorable. The intervention of ploughed land, on which the scent soon cools or evaporates, is at least perilous; but sheep-stains, recently left by a flock, are fatal: they cut off the scent irrecoverably making a gap, as it were, in the clew, in which the dogs have not even a hint for their guidance."

Compare Shakspeare again :

"Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep,

To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell;

And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear :

"For there his smell with others being mingled,
The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled
With much ado the cold fault cleanly out;

Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies."

One more extract from Mr. Ayton:

Suppose, then, after the usual rounds, that you see the hare at last (a sorry mark for so many foes) sorely beleaguered-looking dark and draggled-limping heavily along; then stopping to listen — again tottering on a little and again stopping; and at every step, and every pause, hearing the death-cry grow nearer and louder."

One more comparison, and we have exhausted Shakspeare's description:

"By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill,

Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,

To harken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;
And now his grief may be comparéd well
To one sore sick that hears the passing bell.

"Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn and return, indenting with the way;
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay:

For misery is trodden on by many,

And being low, never relieved by any."

It would be easy

Here, then, be it observed, are not only the same objects, the same accidents, the same movement, in each description, but the very words employed to convey the scene to the mind are often the same in each. to say that Mr. Ayton copied Shakspeare. We believe he did not. There is a sturdy ingenuousness about his writings which would have led him to notice the Venus and Adonis if he had had it in his mind. Shakspeare and he had each looked minutely and practically upon the same scene; and the wonder is, not that Shakspeare was an accurate describer, but that in him the accurate is so thoroughly fused with the poetical, that it is one and the same life.

The celebrated description of the courser in the Venus and Adonis is another remarkable instance of the accuracy of the young Shakspeare's observation. Not the most experienced dealer ever new the points of a horse better. The whole poem, indeed, is full of evidence that the circumstances by which the writer was surrounded, in a country district, had entered deeply into his mind, and were reproduced in the poetical form. The bird "tangled in a net" the "di-dapper peering through a wave"- the "blue-veined violets " the

"Red morn, that ever yet betokened

Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field"

the fisher that forbears the "ungrown fry "the sheep "gone to fold"- the caterpillars feeding on "the tender

leaves "
image,

and, not to weary with examples, that exquisite

"Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky,
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye,”.

all these bespeak a poet who had formed himself upon nature, and not upon books. To understand the value, as well as the rarity of this quality in Shakspeare, we should open any contemporary poem. Take Marlowe's "Herc and Leander" for example. We read line after line, beautiful, gorgeous, running over with a satiating luxuriousness; but we look in vain for a single familiar image. Shakspeare describes what he has seen, throwing over the real the delicious tint of his own imagination. Marlowe looks at Nature herself very rarely; but he knows all the conventional images by which the real is supposed to be elevated into the poetical. His most beautiful things are thus but copies of copies. The mode in which each poet

describes the morning will illustrate our meaning:

"Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast

The sun ariseth in his majesty ;

Who doth the world so gloriously behold,

The cedar-tops and hills seem burnished gold.”

We feel that this is true. Compare

"By this Apollo's golden harp began

To sound forth music to the ocean;

Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard

But he the day bright-bearing car prepared,

And ran before, as harbinger of light,

And with his flaring beams mocked ugly Night,
Till she, o'ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,
Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage."

We are taught that this is classical.

Coleridge has observed that, "in the Venus and Adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words

VOL. VIII.

33

without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant." * This self-controlling power of “varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm" is, perhaps, one of the most signal instances of Shakspeare's consummate mastery of his art, even as a very young man. He who, at the proper season, knew how to strike the grandest music within the compass of our own powerful and sonorous language, in his early productions breathes out his thoughts.

"To the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorder."

The sustained sweetness of the versification is never cloying; and yet there are no violent contrasts, no sudden elevations: all is equable in its infinite variety. The early comedies are full of the same rare beauty. In Love's Labor's Lost-The Comedy of Errors - A Midsummer Night's Dream we have verses of alternate rhymes formed upon the same model as those of the Venus and Adonis, and producing the same feeling of placid delight by their exquisite harmony. The same principles on which he built the versification of the Venus and Adonis exhibited to him the grace which these elegiac harmonies would impart to the scenes of repose in the progress of a dramatic action.

We proceed to the Lucrece. Of that poem the date of the composition is fixed as accurately as we can desire. In the dedication to the Venus and Adonis the poet says, "If your honor seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honored you with some graver labor." In 1594, a year after the Venus and Adonis, Lucrece was published, and was dedicated to Lord Southampton. This, then, was undoubtedly the "graver labor;" this was the pro

* 66 Biographia Literaria," vol. ii. p. 14.

duce of the idle hours" of 1593. Shakspeare was then nearly thirty years of age the period at which it is held by some he first began to produce any thing original for the stage. The poet unquestionably intended the " graver labor" for a higher effort than had produced the "first heir" of his invention. He describes the Venus and Adonis as "unpolished lines"-lines thrown off with youthful luxuriousness and rapidity. The verses of the Lucrece are "untutored lines ” lines formed upon no established model. There is to our mind the difference of eight or even ten years in the aspect of these poems· difference as manifest as that which exists between Love's Labor's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. Coleridge has marked the great distinction between the one poem and the other:

a

"The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspeare's management of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited by the same impetuous vigor of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection: and, lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language."*

It is in this paragraph that Coleridge has marked the difference which a critic of the very highest order could alone have pointed out between the power which Shakspeare's mind possessed of going out of itself in a narrative poem, and the dramatic power. The same mighty, and to most unattainable, power, of utterly subduing the selfconscious to the universal, was essential to the highest excellence of both species of composition, the poem and

* "Biographia Literaria,” vol. ii. p. 21.