uct of one mind. He did not go out of
himself to inform other natures, but he included these natures in
himself; and though he does not infuse his individuality into his
characters, he does infuse it into the general conceptions which the
characters illustrate. His opinions, purposes, theory of life, are to be
gathered, not from what his characters say and do, but from the results
of what they say and do; and in each play he so combines and disposes
the events and persons that the cumulative impression shall express his
own judgment, indicate his own design, and convey his own feeling. His
individuality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we grasp it
so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it altogether, and conceive his
mind as impersonal. In view of the multiplicity of his creations, and
the range of thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a
common hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal. But, in
truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative action, like other
minds, within the limits of its personal sympathies, though these
sympathies in him were keener, quicker, and more general than in other
men of genius. He was a great-hearted, broad-brained person, but still a
person, and not what Coleridge calls him, an "omnipresent creativeness."
Whatever he could sympathize with, he could embody and vitally
represent; but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being
universal, and when he was indifferent or hostile, the dramatist was
partially suspended in the satirist and caricaturist, and oversight took
the place of insight. Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated
than his enlargements. We know what he has not done more surely than we
know what he has done; for if we attempt to follow his genius in any of
the numerous lines of direction along which it sweeps with such
victorious ease, we soon come to the end of our tether, and are confused
with a throng of thoughts and imaginations, which, as Emerson
exquisitely says, "sweetly torment us with invitations to their own
_inaccessible_ homes." But there were some directions which his genius
did not take,--not so much from lack of mental power as from lack of
disposition or from positive antipathy. Let us consider some of these.

And first, Shakespeare's religious instincts and sentiments were
comparatively weak, for they were not creative. He has exercised his
genius in the creation of no character in which religious sentiment