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The Portrait of Mr W. H.

It is necessary that “some child of yours,” some artistic creation that embodies you, and to which your imagination gives life, shall present you to the world's wondering eyes. Your own thoughts are your children, offspring of sense and spirit; give some expression to them, and you shall find—

“Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain.”

My thoughts, also, are my “children.” They are of your begetting and my brain is—

“the womb wherein they grew.”

For this great friendship of ours is indeed a marriage, it is the “marriage of true minds.”

I collected together all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham's theory really was. I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which Shakespeare speaks of the Sonnets themselves, from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work. This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham’s day. And yet it was one of the most important in