1846 Edition.

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

58. Sonnets.

XVII.

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts? 
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts. 
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ’This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’ 
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song: 
  But were some child of yours alive that time,
  You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.

59.  XVIII.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: 
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: 
  So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
  So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

60.  XXX.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: 
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight: 
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before. 
  But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
  All losses are restored and sorrows end.

61.  XXXIII.

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: 
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now. 
  Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
  Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.