as they certainly are), bringing in admirably portrayed common characters, have the unmistakable hue of plays, portraits, made for the divertisement only of the élite of the castle, and from its point of view. The comedies are altogether non-acceptable to America and Democracy.

But to the deepest soul, it seems a shame to pick and choose from the riches Shakespeare has left us to criticise his infinitely royal, multiform quality-to gauge, with optic glasses, the dazzle of his sun-like beams.

From Poet-Lore, July 1890.

Complete Prose Works. Boston, Mass., 1898, p. 394.

Walt Whitman, when he says that "the comedies are altogether nonacceptable to America and Democracy," states rather what he considers ought to be, than what actually is. In his essay, "Poetry To-day in America," he says of Shakespeare, "In portraying medieval European lords and barons, the arrogant poet, so dear to the inmost human heart (pride! pride! dearest, perhaps, of all-touching us, too, of the States closest of all-closer than love), he stands alone, and I do not wonder he so witches the world."-Prose Works, Boston, 1898, p. 283.

RICHARD WATSON GILDER, 1891
(b. 1844)

"The Twenty-Third of April."

A LITTLE English earth and breathed air
Made Shakespeare the divine; so is his verse
The broidered soil of every blossom fair;

So doth his song all sweet bird-songs rehearse.
But tell me, then, what wondrous stuff did fashion

That part of him which took those wilding flights Among imagined worlds; whence the white passion That burned three centuries through the days and nights!

Not heaven's four winds could make, nor round the earth, The soul wherefrom the soul of Hamlet flamed;

Nor anything of merely mortal birth

Could lighten as when Shakespeare's name is named. How was his body bred we know full well,

But that high soul's engendering who may tell!

"Five Books of Song." IV. The Two Worlds. 1894, p. 154.

MATHILDE BLIND, c. 1894
(1841-1896)

"Shakespeare."

YEARNING to know herself for all she was,
Her passionate clash of warring good and ill,
Her new life ever ground in Death's old mill,
With every delicate detail and en masse,-
Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass,

That Time, to work out her unconscious will,
Once wrought the mind which she had groped to fill,
And she beheld herself as in a glass.

The world of men, unrolled before our sight,
Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall,
And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height
Stand faithfully recorded, great and small,
For Shakespeare was, and at his touch with light
Impartial as the sun's, revealed the All.

"Shakespeare Sonnets, vII." Poetical Works. Ed.
Arthur Symons. 1900, p. 443.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, BEFORE 1892

(1809-1892)

THERE are three repartees in Shakespeare which always bring tears to my eyes from their simplicity.

One is in King Lear, when Lear says to Cordelia, "So young and so so untender," and Cordelia lovingly answers, "So young, my lord, and true." And in The Winter's Tale, when Florizel takes Perdita's hand to lead her to the dance, and says, "So turtles pair that never mean to part," and the little Perdita answers, giving her hand to Florizel, "I'll swear for 'em." And in Cymbeline, when Imogen in tender rebuke says to her husband:

"Why did you throw your wedded lady from you?

Think that you are upon a rock; and now,

Throw me again!"

and Posthumus does not ask forgiveness, but answers, kissing her:

"Hang there like fruit, my soul,

Till the tree die."

Life and Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Ed.
Hallam, Lord Tennyson. 1898, vol. iv. pp.

39 et seq.

See also ib., pp. 39-43.

SIDNEY LEE, 1899

(b. 1859)

He knew

SHAKESPEARE'S mind, as Hazlitt suggested, contained within itself the germs of all faculty and feeling. intuitively how every faculty and feeling would develop in any conceivable change of fortune. Men and womengood or bad, old or young, wise or foolish, merry or sad, rich or poor-yielded their secrets to him, and his genius enabled him to give being in his pages to all the shapes of humanity that present themselves on the highway of life. Each of his characters gives voice to thought or passion with an individuality and a naturalness that rouse in the intelligent playgoer and reader the illusion that they are overhearing men and women speak unpremeditatingly among themselves, rather than that they are reading written speeches or hearing written speeches recited. The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination fairies, ghosts, witches-are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. The creative power of poetry was never manifested to such effect as in the corporeal semblances in which Shakespeare clad the spirits of the air.

So mighty a faculty sets at nought the common limitations of nationality, and in every quarter of the globe to which civilised life has penetrated, Shakespeare's power is