eathes,
calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous, protrusive;
all the better for that. There is a sound in it like the ring of steel.
This man too had a right stroke in him, had it come to that!

But I will say, of Shakespeare's works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are
so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was in
him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect,
written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and there a note
of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come upon you
like splendour out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very
heart of the thing: you say, "That is _true_, spoken once and forever;
wheresoever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that will be
recognised as true!" Such bursts, however, make us feel that the
surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is in part, temporary,
conventional. Alas, Shakespeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse:
his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other
mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No man works save
under conditions. The sculptor, cannot set his own free Thought before
us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was
given, with the tools that were given. _Disjecta membra_[83] are all
that we find of any Poet, or of any man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakespeare 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; _un_speakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven: "We are
such stuff as Dreams are made of!" That scroll in Westminster Abbey,[84]
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 Shakespeare
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 Shakespeare too;