drudgery and dryasdust work, young poets," Shakspere would seem to say, who had himself so carefully labored over his English and Roman histories; "for Miranda's sake such drudgery may well seem light." Therefore, also, Prospero surrounds the marriage of Ferdinand to his daughter with a religious awe. Ferdinand must honor her as sacred, and win her by hard toil. But the work of the higher imagination is not drudgery; it is swift and serviceable among all the elements-fire upon the topmast, the sea-nymph upon the sands; Ceres, the goddess of earth, with harvest blessings, in the masque. It is essentially Ariel, an airy spirit-the imaginative genius of poetry but recently delivered in England from long slavery to Sycorax. Prospero's departure from the island is the abandoning by Shakspere of the theatre, the scene of his marvellous works:

"Graves, at my command,

Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them forth,
By my so potent art."

Henceforth Prospero is but a man-no longer a great enchanter. He returns to the dukedom he had lost, in Stratford-upon-Avon, and will pay no tribute henceforth to any Alonzo or Lucy of them all.*

Thus one may be permitted to play with the grave subject of The Tempest; and I ask no more credit for the interpretation here proposed than is given to any other equally innocent, if trifling, attempt to read the supposed allegory.

Shakspere's work, however, will, indeed, not allow itself to be lightly treated. The prolonged study of any great interpreter of human life is a discipline. Our loyalty to

* Ulrici has recently expressed his opinion that a farewell to the theatre may be discovered in The Tempest; but he rightly places Henry VIII. later than The Tempest (Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, vol. vi., p. 358).

Shakspere must not lead us to assert that the discipline of Shakspere will be suitable to every nature. He will deal rudely with heart and will and intellect, and lay hold of them in unexpected ways, and fashion his disciple, it may be, in a manner which at first is painful and almost terrible. There are persons who, all through their lives, attain their highest strength only by virtue of the presence of certain metaphysical entities which rule their lives; and in the lives of almost all men there is a metaphysical period when they need such supposed entities more than the real presences of those personal and social forces which surround them. For such persons, and during such a period, the discipline of Shakspere will be unsuitable. He will seem precisely the reverse of what he actually is: he will seem careless about great facts and ideas; limited, restrictive, deficient in enthusiasms and imagination. To one who finds the highest poetry in Shelley, Shakspere will always remain a kind of prose. Shakspere is the poet of concrete things and real. True, but are not these informed with passion and with thought? A time not seldom comes when a man, abandoning abstractions and metaphysical entities, turns to the actual life of the world, and to the real men and women who surround him, for the sources of emotion and thought and action—a time when he strives to come into communion with the Unseen, not immediately, but through the revelation of the Seen. And then he finds the strength and sustenance with which Shakspere has enriched the world.

"The true question to ask,' says the Librarian of Congress, in a paper read before the Social Science Convention at New York, October, 1869-'The true question to ask respecting a book is, Has it helped any human soul?' This is the hint, statement, not only of the great Literatus, his book, but of every great artist. It may be that

all works of art are to be first tried by their art-qualities, their image-forming talent, and their dramatic, pictorial, plot-constructing, euphonious, and other talents. Then, whenever claiming to be first-class works, they are to be strictly and sternly tried by their foundation in, and radiation (in the highest sense, and always indirectly) of, the ethic principles, and eligibility to free, arouse, dilate.”*

What shall be said of Shakspere's radiation, through art, of the ultimate truths of conscience and of conduct? What shall be said of his power of freeing, arousing, dilating? Something may be gathered out of the foregoing chapters in answer to these questions. But the answers remain insufficient. There is an admirable sentence by Emerson: "A good reader can in a sort nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspere's. We are still out of doors."

We are still out of doors; and, for the present, let us cheerfully remain in the large, good space. Let us not attenuate Shakspere to a theory. He is careful that we shall not thus lose our true reward: "The secrets of nature have not more gift in taciturnity."+ Shakspere does not supply us with a doctrine, with an interpretation, with a revelation. What he brings to us is this-to each one, courage and energy and strength to dedicate himself and his work to that, whatever it be, which life has revealed to him as best and highest and most real.

* Whitman, "Democratic Vistas,” p. 67.
+ Troilus and Cressida, act iv., sc. 2.

INDEX.

Falstaff, ethics of, $25; view of life | Henry VI., as a prisoner, 159; causes