ealth and longevity from his festal 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 Shakespeare
also, and finds him to share the halfness and imperfection of
humanity.

Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendour 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. Shakespeare employed them as colours 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 Shakespeare 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 th