ave 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 occasion 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 Shakespeare 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 of 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.

Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare's. We are still out of
doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare 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 o