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These forums are being phased out. The new, improved The Merchant of Venice Forum is at shakespeareforums.com.

Ahoy fellow travelers and Great Books lovers!

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We prefer deep reflections on American History, Philosophy, Shakespearean Sonnets, and tender musings along the lines of:

LXIV

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz'd,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded, to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate--
That Time will come and take my love away. 
  This thought is as a death which cannot choose
  But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.
 	--William Shakespeare

XXII

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
So long as youth and thou are of one date;
But when in thee time's furrows I behold,
Then look I death my days should expiate. 
For all that beauty that doth cover thee,
Is but the seemly raiment of my heart,
Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me:
How can I then be elder than thou art?
O! therefore love, be of thyself so wary
As I, not for myself, but for thee will;
Bearing thy heart, which I will keep so chary
As tender nurse her babe from faring ill.
  Presume not on th;heart when mine is slain,
  Thou gav'st me thine not to give back again.
 	--William Shakespeare

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Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, -that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1819

All The Best,

William Einstein Shakespeare :)

LXXXVI

Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
Bound for the prize of all too precious you,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write,
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
As victors of my silence cannot boast;
I was not sick of any fear from thence:
  But when your countenance fill'd up his line,
  Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine.
 	--William Shakespeare