r than match it for tender and pure simplicity of
words more "dearly sweet and bitter" than the bitterest or the sweetest
of men's tears. Then, after the duly and properly conventional
engagement on the parts of Palamon and Emilia respectively to devote the
anniversary "to tears" and "to honour," the deeper note returns for one
grand last time, grave at once and sudden and sweet as the full choral
opening of an anthem: the note which none could ever catch of
Shakespeare's very voice gives out the peculiar cadence that it alone can
give in the modulated instinct of a solemn change or shifting of the
metrical emphasis or _ictus_ from one to the other of two repeated
words:--

That nought could buy
Dear love; but loss of dear love!

That is a touch beyond the ear or the hand of Fletcher: a chord sounded
from Apollo's own harp after a somewhat hoarse and reedy wheeze from the
scrannel-pipe of a lesser player than Pan. Last of all, in words worthy
to be the latest left of Shakespeare's, his great and gentle Theseus
winds up the heavenly harmonies of his last beloved great poem.

And now, coming at length within the very circle of Shakespeare's
culminant and crowning constellation, bathing my whole soul and spirit
for the last and (if I live long enough) as surely for the first of many
thousand times in the splendours of the planet whose glory is the light
of his very love itself, standing even as Dante

in the clear
Amorous silence of the Swooning-sphere,

what shall I say of thanksgiving before the final feast of Shakespeare?

The grace must surely be short enough if it would at all be gracious.
Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen years
since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that
none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself
alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that
either would have any new thing to tell us of the _Tempest_, the
_Winter's Tale_, and _Cymbeline_. And for ourselves, what else could we
do but only ring changes on the word beautiful as Celia on the word
wonderful in her laughing litany of love? or what better or what more can
we do than in the deepest and most heartfelt sense of an old conventional
phrase, thank God and Shakespeare? for how to praise either for such a
gift of gifts we know not, knowing only and surely that none will know
for ever.

True or false,