any man.

* * * * *

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognise that he
too was a _Prophet_, in his way; of an insight analogous to the
Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to
this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven: 'We
are such stuff as Dreams are made of!' That scroll in Westminster
Abbey, which few read with understanding, is of the depth of any seer.
But the man sang; did not preach, except musically. We called Dante
the melodious Priest of Middle-Age Catholicism. May we not call
Shakspeare the still more melodious Priest of a _true_ Catholicism,
the 'Universal Church' of the Future and of all times? No narrow
superstition, harsh asceticism, intolerance, fanatical fierceness or
perversion: a Revelation, so far as it goes, that such a thousandfold
hidden beauty and divineness dwells in all Nature; which let all men
worship as they can! We may say without offence, that there rises a
kind of universal Psalm out of this Shakspeare too; not unfit to make
itself heard among the still more sacred Psalms. Not in disharmony
with these, if we understood them, but in harmony!--I cannot call this
Shakspeare a 'Sceptic,' as some do; his indifference to the creeds and
theological quarrels of his time misleading them. No: neither
unpatriotic, though he says little about his Patriotism; nor sceptic,
though he says little about his Faith. Such 'indifference' was the
fruit of his greatness withal: his whole heart was in his own grand
sphere of worship (we may call it such): these other controversies,
vitally important to other men, were not vital to him.

But call it worship, call it what you will, is it not a right glorious
thing, and set of things, this that Shakspeare has brought us? For
myself, I feel that there is actually a kind of sacredness in the fact
of such a man being sent into this Earth. Is he not an eye to us all;
a blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light?--And, at bottom, was it not
perhaps far better that this Shakspeare, everyway an unconscious man,
was _conscious_ of no Heavenly message? He did not feel, like Mahomet,
because he saw into those internal Splendours, that he specially was
the 'Prophet of God:' and was he not greater than Mahomet in that?
Greater; and also, if we compute strictly, as we did in Dante's case,
more successful. It was intrinsically an error that notion of
Mahomet's, of his supreme Prophethood: and has come down to u