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Though Shakespeare's sonnets are unequal in literary merit, many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy which are not to be matched elsewhere in poetry. Numerous lines like
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy
or
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
seem to illustrate the perfection of human utterance. If a few of the poems sink into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits, others are almost overcharged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery, and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power.¹
¹ This preface mainly deals with the bibliographical history of the sonnets, and the problems involved in the circumstances of their publication. In regard to the general significance of the poems—their bearing on Shakespeare's biography and character or their relations to the massive sonnet literature of the day, at home and abroad—I only offer here a few remarks and illustrations supplementary to what I have already written on these subjects in my *Life of Shakespeare*, fifth edition, 1905, or in the Introduction to the *Elizabethan Sonnets*, 1904 (Constable's reissue of Arber's English Garner). The abundant criticism which has been lavished on my already published comments has not modified my faith in the justice of my general position or in the fruitfulness of my general line of investigation. My friend Canon Beeching has, in reply to my strictures, ably restated the ‘autobiographic’ or ‘literal’ theory in his recent edition of the sonnets (1904), but it seems to me that he attaches insufficient weight to Shakespeare’s habit of mind elsewhere, and to the customs and conventions of contemporary literature, especially to those which nearly touch the relations commonly subsisting among Elizabethan authors, patrons, and publishers. Canon Beeching’s
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