V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.

Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by

originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,

like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay, and

making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor

does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero

is in the press of knights, and the thick of events; and, seeing what

men want, and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight

and of arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the

most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes

uppermost, and, because he says everything, saying, at last, something

good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing

whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest,

freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most

determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.

The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have

any individual great, except through the general. There is no choice

to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning, and say,

"I am full of life, I will go to sea, and find an Antarctic continent:

to-day I will square the circle: I will ransack botany, and find a new

food for man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new

mechanic power;" no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts

and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his

contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and

their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The

church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the

advice which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her

chants and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him by

trumpet, in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two

counties groping to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of

production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad.

Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in

his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he

wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the

shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him

thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the

hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets,

artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their

labors. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of

the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for

himself: his powers would be expended in the first preparations. Great

genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at

all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and

suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.

Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were

importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily

at political allusions, and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans,

a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican

church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,

houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs,

were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted

this new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no,

not by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or

puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ, which was ballad, epic,

newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library, at the same time.

Probably king, prelate and puritan, all found their own account in it.

It had become, by all causes, a national interest,--by no means

conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating

it in an English history,--but not a whit less considerable, because

it was cheap, and of no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof

of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this

field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood,

Middleton, Peele, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher.

The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the

first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in

idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the

case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left

Stratford, and went up to London, a great body of stage-plays, of

all dates and writers, existed in manuscript, and were in turn produced

on the boards. Here is the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear

hearing some part of every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other

stories out of Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of

English history, from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the

royal Henries, which men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful

tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the

London 'prentices know. All the mass has been treated, with more or

less skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the soiled and

tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote

them first. They have been the property of the Theatre so long, and

so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a

speech, or a whole scene, or adding a song, that no man can any longer

claim copyright on this work of numbers. Happily, no man wishes to.

They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many

spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are.

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old

plays, waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had

the _prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing

could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England

circulated in the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he

wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in

popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain

his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies

a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to

his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities

of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture

owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt, and in Greece, grew up in

subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall:

at first, a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became

bolder, and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being

still arrayed with reference to the building, which serves also as a

frame to hold the figures; and when, at last, the greatest freedom of

style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture

still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As

soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the

temple or palace, the art began to decline: freak, extravagance, and

exhibition, took the place of the old temperance. This balance-wheel,

which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability

of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which

the people were already wonted, and which had a certain excellence

which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create.

In point of fact, it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all

directions, and was able to use whatever he found; and the amount of

indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in

regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which,

"out of 6043 lines, 1771 were written by some author preceding

Shakspeare; 2373 by him, on the foundation laid by his predecessors;

and 1899 were entirely his own." And the preceding investigation hardly

leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is

an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII., I think I see

plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer

stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful

man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well their

cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with Cromwell,

where,--instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is, that the

thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will best

bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given tune,

and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play

contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's

hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like

autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the

bad rhythm.

Shakspeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable that any

invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his

resources; and, at that day our petulant demand for originality was

not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The

universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet, who

appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light

which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower

of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he

comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore

little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through

translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant

countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are

equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near

home. Other men say wise things as well as he; only they say a good

many foolish things, and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He

knows the sparkle of the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever

he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps; of Chaucer,

of Saadi. They felt that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians

and historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and

dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world,--

"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line

And the tale of Troy divine."

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature;

and, more recently, not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to

him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large

unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence

which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer,

it seems, drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di

Colonna, whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation

from Dares Phrygius, Ovid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and

the Provencal poets, are his benefactors: the Romaunt of the Rose is

only judicious translation from William of Lorris and John of Meun:

Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino: The Cock and the Fox,

from the _Lais_ of Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or

Italian: and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or

stone-quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this

apology,--that what he takes has no worth where he finds it, and the

greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of

rule in literature, that a man, having once shown himself capable of

original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings

of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can

entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain

awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but, as soon as we

have learned what to do with them, they become our own.

Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The

learned member of the legislature, at Westminster, or at Washington,

speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now

invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes,

the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or

conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,

and it will bereave his fine attitude and resistance of something of

their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke

and Rousseau think for thousands; and so there were fountains all

around Homer, Menu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends,

lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished,--which, if seen,

would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did

he feel himself, overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the

consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delhi

whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily

so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debt

which such a man could contract to other wit, would never disturb his

consciousness of originality: for the ministrations of books, and of

other minds, are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with

which he has conversed.

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the

world, was no man's work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand

wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a

wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language.

But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and

churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there

was not some translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its energy

and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a

translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic church,--these

collected, too, in long periods, from the prayers and meditations of

every saint and sacred writer, all over the world. Grotius makes the

like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer, that the single clauses

of which it is composed were already in use, in the time of Christ,

in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous

language of the Common Law, the impressive forms of our courts, and

the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions, are the

contribution of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who have lived

in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch

gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never

was a time when there was none. All the truly diomatic and national

phrases are kept, and all others successively picked out and thrown

away. Something like the same process had gone on, long before, with

the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with

world-books. Vedas, Aesop's Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, Iliad,

Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the work of single men. In

the composition of such works, the time thinks, the market thinks, the

mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for

us. Every book supplies its time with one good word; every municipal

law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic catholic

genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the

originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and

embodiment of his own.

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, and the Shakspeare

Society, for ascertaining the steps of the English drama, from the

Mysteries celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final

detachment from the church, and the completion of secular plays, from

Ferrex and Porrex, and Gammer Gurton's Needle, down to the possession

of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare altered, remodelled,

and finally made his own. Elated with success, and piqued by the growing

interest of the problem, they have left no book-stall unsearched, no

chest in a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose

in damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy

Shakspeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door,

whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second-best

bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife.

There is somewhat touching in the madness with which the passing age

mischooses the object on which all candles shine, and all eyes are

turned; the care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen

Elizabeth, and King James, and the Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs, and

Buckinghams; and let pass without a single valuable note the founder

of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be

remembered,--the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the

inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people

of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive

this and not another bias. A popular player,--nobody suspected he was

the poet of the human race; and the secret was kept as faithfully from

poets and intellectual men, as from courtiers and frivolous people.

Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times,

never mentioned his name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few

words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame

whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the

praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of

all question, the better poet of the two.

If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's

time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born

four years after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after him;

and I find among his correspondents and acquaintances, the following

persons: Theodore Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, Earl of

Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane,

Isaac Walton, Dr. Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton,

John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Albericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi,

Ariminius; with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated,

without enumerating many others, whom doubtless he saw,--Shakspeare,

Spenser, Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, two Herberts, Marlow, Chapman,

and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in

Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society;--yet

their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe.

Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near.

It took a century to make it suspected; and not until two centuries

had passed, after his death, did any criticism which we think adequate

begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare

till now; for he is the father of German literature: it was on the

introduction of Shakspeare into German by Lessing, and the translation

of his works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid burst of German

literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the

nineteenth century, whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet,

that the tragedy of Hamlet should find such wondering readers. Now,

literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakspearized. His mind is the

horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see. Our ears are educated

to music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Goethe are the only critics who

have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity: but there

is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative

power and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the period.

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the

missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to

proof; and with what results? Beside some important illustration of

the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have

gleaned a few facts touching the property, and dealings in regard to

property, of the poet. It appears that, from year to year, he owned

a larger share in the Blackfriars' Theater: its wardrobe and other

appurtenances were his: that he bought an estate in his native village,

with his earnings, as writer and shareholder; that he lived in the

best house in Stratford; was intrusted by his neighbors with their

commissions in London, as of borrowing money, and the like; that he

was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth,

he sues Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for

thirty-five shillings ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different

times; and, in all respects, appears as a good husband, with no

reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good-natured sort of

man, an actor and shareholder in the theater, not in any striking

manner distinguished from other actors and managers. I admit the

importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have

been taken to procure it.

But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these

researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite

invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We

are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage,

birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage,

publication of books, celebrity, death; and when we have come to an

end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the

goddess-born; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the

"Modern Plutarch," and read any other life there, it would have fitted

the poems as well, It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the

rainbow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past,

and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dyce, and Collier, have

wasted their oil. The famed theaters, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, the

Park, and Tremont, have vainly assisted. Betterton, Garrick, Kemble,

Kean, and Macready, dedicate their lives to this genius; him they

crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The

recitation begins; one golden word leaps out immortal from all this

painted pedantry, and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own

inaccessible homes. I remember, I went once to see the Hamlet of a

famed performer, the pride of the English stage; and all I then heard,

and all I now remember, of the tragedian, was that in which the

tragedian had no part; simply, Hamlet's question to the ghost,--

"What may this mean,

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel

Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"

That imagination which dilates the closet he writes into the world's

dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces

the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his

magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room. Can any biography

shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's Dream

admits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder,

sacristan, or surrogate, in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate

creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the

moonlight of Portia's villa, "the antres vast and desarts idle," of

Othello's captivity,--where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the

chancellor's file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one

word of those transcendent secrets. In fine, in this drama, as in all

great works of art,--in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India;

in the Phidian sculpture; the Gothic minsters; the Italian painting;

the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,--the Genius draws up the ladder

after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to

a new, who see the works, and ask in vain for a history.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell

nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us; that is, to our most

apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod,

and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents

extricated, analyzed, and compared, by the assiduous Dyce and Collier;

and now read one of those skyey sentences,--aerolites,--which seem to

have fallen out of heaven, and which, not your experience, but the man

within the breast, has accepted as words of fate; and tell me if they

match; if the former account in any manner for the latter; or, which

gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet, with Shakspeare

for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the

information which is material, that which describes character and

fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with

him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions

on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,--on life and

death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life, and the

ways whereby we may come at them; on the characters of men, and the

influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes: and on those

mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science, and which yet

interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who

ever read the volume of Sonnets, without finding that the poet had

there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the

lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the

most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?

What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can

discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what

forms and humanities pleased him; his delight in troops of friends,

in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let

Antonio the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakspeare

being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history,

known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of

philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life, has he not

settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What

office or function, or district of man's work, has he not remembered?

What king has he not taught state, as Talma taught Napoleon? What

maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he

not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not

instructed in the rudeness of his behavior?

Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakspeare

valuable, that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is

falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these

critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was

a full man, who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and images,

which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less,

we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good

a dramatist he was,--and he is the best in the world. But it turns

out; that what he has to say is of that weight, as to withdraw some

attention from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose history

is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs

and pictures, and cut up into proverbs; so that the occasions which

gave the saint's meaning the form of a conversation, or of a prayer,

or of a code of laws, is immaterial compared with the universality of

its application. So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book of

life. He wrote the airs for all our modern music: he wrote the text

of modern life; the text of manners: he drew the man of England and

Europe; the father of the man in America: he drew the man and described

the day, and what is done in it: he read the hearts of men and women,

their probity, and their second thought, and wiles; the wiles of

innocence, and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into

their contraries: he could divide the mother's part from the father's

part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom

and fate: he knew the laws of repression which make the police of

nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his

mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the

importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of Drama or Epic,

out of notice. 'Tis like making a question concerning the paper on

which a king's message is written.

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he

is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.

A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think

from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For

executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can

imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible

with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and only just

within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life, is the

equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the

creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were

people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such

distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as

sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an

ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity

co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell,

and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations,

opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he

disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves that other

part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and

strength. But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but

all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no

bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the

great he tells greatly; the small subordinately. He is wise without

emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts

the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as

she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the

other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative,

and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous

of the perception of other readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things

into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added

a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural

history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras

and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or

blur: he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass;

the tragic and comic indifferently, and without any distortion or

favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a

hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a

mountain; and yet these like nature's, will bear the scrutiny of the

solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of

production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the

power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch

its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch

a million. There are always objects; but there was never representation.

Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of

figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making

of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into

song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though

their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as

inimitable as they: and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit

of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so

is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now

as a whole poem.

Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which

tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence

is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers and

followers, that the logician is satisfied. His means are as admirable

as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself

to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not

reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off with

him in some distant direction: he always rides.

The finest poetry was first experience: but the thought has suffered

a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often

attain a good degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to

read, through their poems, their personal history; any one acquainted

with parties can name every figure: this is Andrew, and that is Rachel.

The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings, and

not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind, the fact has gone quite over

into the new element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial.

This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, from the truth and

closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart. Yet there

is not a trace of egotism.

One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his

cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet,--for beauty is his

aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace: he

delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that

sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds

over the universe. Epicurus relates, that poetry hath such charms that

a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true

bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies

in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and Saadi says, "It was rumored

abroad that I was penitent; but what had I to do with repentance?" Not

less sovereign and cheerful,--much more sovereign and cheerful is the

tone of Shakspeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart

of men. If he should appear in any company of human souls, who would

not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health

and longevity from his festive style.

And now, how stands the account of man with this bard and benefactor,

when in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame,

we seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere lessons; it can

teach us to spare both heroes and poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also,

and finds him to share the halfness and imperfections of humanity.

Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that

plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than

for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth,

than for tillage and roads: that these things bore a second and finer

harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in

all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life.

Shakspeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested

in their beauty; and never took the step which seemed inevitable to

such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which resides in these

symbols, and imparts this power,--what is that which they themselves

say? He converted the elements, which waited on his command, into

entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as

if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets

given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw

them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a

holiday night, and advertise in all towns, "very superior pyrotechny

this evening!" Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand

them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar?

One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran--"The heavens and

the earth, and all that is between them, think ye we have created them

in jest?" As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the

world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is to

life, and its materials, and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me?

What does it signify? It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night's

Dream, or a Winter Evening's Tale: what signifies another picture more

or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to

mind, that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact

to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping

with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less,

had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon,

Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of

human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to the science of

mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the

standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,--that he should

not be wise for himself,--it must even go into the world's history,

that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius

for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German, and Swede,

beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was

contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanishes; they

read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a

sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly,

joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with

doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse, behind us; with doomsdays

and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer

and the heart of the listener sank in them. It must be conceded that

these are half-views of half-men. The world still wants its

poet-priest, a reconciler, who shall not trifle with Shakspeare the

player, nor shall grope in graves with Swedenborg the mourner; but who

shall see, speak, and act, with equal inspiration. For knowledge will

brighten the sunshine; right is more beautiful than private affection;

and love is compatible with universal wisdom.