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 sweet smell
    Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
    Could make me any Summer’s story tell,
    Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew: 
    Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
    Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
    They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
    Drawn after you; you pattern of all those. 
    Yet seem’d it Winter still, and, you away,
    As with your shadow I with these did play.”

And I am scarcely less persuaded that a third cluster, of nine, had the same source.  These, too, are clearly concerned with the deeper interests and regards of private life; they carry a homefelt energy and pathos, such as argue them to have had a far other origin than in trials of art; they speak of compelled absences from the object that inspired them, and are charged with regrets and confessions, such as could only have sprung from the Poet’s own breast: 

    “Alas! ’tis true I have gone here and there,
    And made myself a motley to the view;
    Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
    Made old offences of affections new: 
    Most true it is, that I have look’d on truth
    Askance and strangely.

    “O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide,
    The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
    That did not better for my life provide,
    Than public means, which public manners breeds. 
    Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
    And almost thence my nature is subdu’d
    To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.