y," lips
that "so sweetly were forsworn," eyes that "look their last" on all
they love, these are the touches that make us bow down before the
final terrible absolution. And it is the same with Nature. Not to
Shakespeare do we go for those pseudo-scientific, pseudo-ethical
interpretations, so crafty in their word-painting, so cunning in their
rational analysis, which we find in the rest. A few fierce-flung words,
from the hot heart of an amorist's lust, and all the smouldering magic
of the noon-day woods takes your breath. A sobbing death-dirge
from the bosom of a love-lorn child, and the perfume of all the
"enclosed gardens" in the world shudders through your veins.

And what about the ancient antagonist of the Earth? What about the
Great Deep? Has anyone, anywhere else, gathered into words the
human tremor and the human recoil that are excited universally
when we go down "upon the beached verge of the salt flood, who
once a day with his embossed froth the turbulent surge doth cover?"
John Keats was haunted day and night by the simple refrain in Lear,
"Canst thou not hear the Sea?"

Charming Idyllists may count the petals of the cuckoo-buds in the
river-pastures; and untouched, we admire. But let old Falstaff, as he
lies a' dying, "babble o' green fields," and all the long, long thoughts
of youth steal over us, like a summer wind.

The modern critic, with a philosophic bias, is inclined to quarrel
with the obvious human congruity of Shakespeare's utterances. What
is the _use_ of this constant repetition of the obvious truism: "When
we are born we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools?"

No use, my friend! No earthly use! And yet it is not a premeditated
reflection, put in "for art's sake." It is the poetry of the pinch of Fate;
it is the human revenge we take upon the insulting irony of our lot.

But Shakespeare does not always strike back at the gods with bitter
blows. In this queer world, where we have "nor youth, nor age, but,
as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both," there come
moments when the spirit is too sore wounded even to rise in revolt.
Then, in a sort of "cheerful despair," we can only wait the event.
And Shakespeare has his word for this also.

Perhaps the worst of all "the slings and arrows" are the intolerable
partings we have to submit to, from the darlings of our soul. And
here, while he offers us no false hope, his tone loses its bitterness,
and grows gentle and solem