It is the loss of his friend he regrets, rather than the loss of his mistress; she is not mentioned save by comparison with "basest clouds." Yet even when read by Gradgrind and his compeers the thirteenth line of this sonnet is utterly inconsistent with passion.
In the next sonnet the friend repents, and weeps the "strong offence," and Shakespeare accepts the sorrow as salve that "heals the wound"; his friend's tears are pearls that "ransom all ill deeds." The next sonnet begins with the line:
"No more be griev'd at that which thou hast done";
Shakespeare will be an "accessory" to his friend's "theft," though he admits that the robbery is still sour. Then come four sonnets in which he is content to forget all about the wrong he has suffered, and simply exhausts himself in praise of his friend. Sonnet 40 begins:
"Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all; What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou may'st true love call; All mine was thine, before thou hadst this more."
This is surely the very soul of tender affection; but it is significant that even here the word "true" is emphasized and not "love"; he goes on:
"I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love's wrong, than hate's known injury."
Never before was a man so gentle-kind; we might be listening to the lament of a broken-hearted woman who smiles through her tears to reassure her lover; yet there is no attempt to disguise the fact that Herbert has done "wrong." The next sonnet puts the poet's feeling as strongly as possible.
"Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits, When I am sometime absent from thy heart, Thy beauty and thy years full well befits, For still temptation follows where thou art. Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won, Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd; And when a woman woos, what woman's son Will sourly leave her till she have prevail'd? Ay me! but yet thou might'st my seat forbear, And chide thy beauty and thy straying youth, Who lead thee in their riot even there Where thou art forced to break a twofold truth; Hers, by thy beauty tempting her to thee, Thine by thy beauty being false to me."
