self good. There is a religion of week-days as well as of Sundays, a religion of 'cakes and ale' as well as of pews and altar-cloths. This England lay before Shakspere as it lies before us all, with its green fields, and its long hedgerows, and its many trees, and its great towns, and its endless hamlets, and its motley society, and its long history, and its bold exploits, and its gathering power; and he saw that they were good. To him perhaps more than to any one else has it been given to see that they were a great unity, a great religious object; that if you could only descend to the inner life, to the deep things, to the secret principles of its noble vigor, to the essence of character, . . . we might, so far as we are capable of so doing, understand the nature which God has made. Let us, then, think of him, not as a teacher of dry dogmas or a sayer of hard sayings, but as

'A priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world,'

a teacher of the hearts of men and women."*

It is impossible, however, that the sixteenth or the seventeenth century should set a limit to the nineteenth. The voyaging spirit of man cannot remain within the enclosure of any one age or any single mind. We need to supplement the noble positivism of Shakspere with an element not easy to describe or define, but none the less actual, which the present century has demanded as essential to its spiritual life and well-being, and which its spiritual teachers-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Newman, Maurice, Carlyle, Browning, Whitman (a strange and apparently motley assemblage)-have supplied and are still supplying. The scientific movement of the present century is not more unquestionably a fact than this is a fact.

* "Estimates of some Englishmen and Scotchmen," by Walter Bagehot, p. 270.

In the meantime, to enter with strong and undisturbed comprehension into Shakspere, let us endeavor to hold ourselves strenuously at the Shaksperian standpoint, and view the universe from thence. We shall afterwards go our way, as seems best, bearing with us Shakspere's gift. And Shakspere has no better gift to bestow than the strength and courage to pursue our own path, througlpain or through joy, with vigor and resolution.

CHAPTER II.

THE GROWTH OF SHAKSPERE'S MIND AND ART.

In the preceding chapter, a brief and partial study was attempted of Shakspere the man and Shakspere the artist, considered as one element in the great intellectual and spiritual movement of the Elizabethan period. The organisma dramatic poet- we endeavored to view in connection with its environment. Now we proceed to observe, in some few of its stages of progress, the growth of that organism. Shakspere in 1590, Shakspere in 1600, and Shakspere in 1610 was one and the same living entity; but the adolescent Shakspere differed from the adult, and again from Shakspere in the supremacy of his ripened manhood, as much as the slender stem, graceful and pliant, spreading its first leaves to the sunshine of May, differs from the moving expanse of greenery visible a century later, which is hard to comprehend and probe with the eye in its infinite details, multitudinous and yet one; receiving through its sensitive surfaces the gifts of light and dew, of noonday and of night; grasping the earth with inextricable living knots; not unpossessed of haunts of shadow and secrecy; instinct with ample mysterious murmurs-the tree which has a history, and bears, in wrinkled bark and wrenched bough, memorials of time and change, of hardship and drought and storm. The poet Gray, in a well-known passage, invented a piece of beautiful mythology, according to which the infant Shakspere is represented as receiving gifts from the great Dispensatress:

"Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,
To him the mighty Mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless Child
Stretch'd forth his little arms and smiled;
This pencil take, she said, whose colors clear
Richly paint the vernal year;

Thine too these golden keys, immortal Boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy,

Of Horror that, and thrilling Fears,

Or ope the sacred fount of sympathetic Tears."

But the mighty Mother, more studious of the welfare of her charge, in fact gave her gifts only as they could be used. Those keys she did not intrust to Shakspere until, by manifold experience, by consolidating of intellect, imagination, and passions, and by the growth of self-control, he had become fitted to confront the dreadful, actual presences of human anguish and of human joy.

Everything takes up its place more rightly in a spacious world, accurately observed, than in the narrow world of the mere idealist. In bare acquisition of ob served fact, Shakspere marvellously increased from year to year. He grew in wisdom and in knowledge (such an admission does not wrong the divinity of genius), not less, but more, than other men. Quite a little library exists illustrating the minute acquaintance of Shakspere with this branch of information and with that: "The Legal Acquirements of Shakspere," "Shakspere's Knowledge and Use of the Bible," "Shakspere's Delineations of Insanity," "The Rural Life of Shakspere," "Shakspere's Garden," "The Ornithology of Shakspere," "The Insects Mentioned by Shakspere," and such like. Conjectural inquiry, which attempts to determine whether Shakspere was an attorney's clerk, or whether he was a soldier; whether Shakspere was ever in Italy, or whether he was

in Germany, or whether he was in Scotland-inquiry such as this may lead to no very certain result with respect to the particular matter in question. But one thing which such special critical studies as these establish is the enormous receptivity of the poet. This vast and varied mass of information he assimilated and made his own. And such store of information came to Shakspere only, by the way, as an addition to the more important possession of knowledge about human character and human life which forms the proper body of fact needful for dramatic art. In proportion as an animal is of great size, the masses of nutriment which he procures are large. "The arctic whale gulps in whole shoals of acalephæ and mollusks."

But it was not alone or chiefly through mass of acquisition that Shakspere became great. He was not merely a centre for the drifting capital of knowledge. Each faculty expanded and became more energetic, while, at the same time, the structural arrangement of the man's whole nature became more complex and involved. His power of thought increased steadily as years went by, both in sure grasp of the known and in brooding intensity of gaze upon the unknown. His emotions, instead of losing their energy and subtlety as youth deepened into manhood, instead of becoming dulled and crusted over by contact with the world, became (as is the case with all the greatest men and women), by contact with the world, swifter and of more ample volume. As Shakspere penetrated further and further into the actual facts of our life, he found in those facts more to rouse and kindle and sustain the heart; he discovered more awful and mysterious darkness, and also more intense and lovelier light. And it is clearly ascertainable from his plays and poems that Shakspere's will grew, with advancing age, beyond measure calmer and more strong. Each formidable temptation he succeeded, before he was done with it, in subdu