d judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.

Literally taken, this is the negation of all the higher functions of
criticism, and the paralysis of all learning. Only his peers, it is
argued, can read Shakespeare intelligently; and, as if that did not give
him few enough readers, they are further told that they will be wasting
their time! But love, unlike this proud Stoicism, is humble, and
contented with a little. I would put my apology in the language of love
rather than of philosophy. I know that in Shakespeare, or in Milton, or
in any rare nature, as in Faire Virtue, the mistress of Philarete--

There is some concealed thing
So each gazer limiting,
He can see no more of merit
Than beseems his worth and spirit.

The appreciation of a great author asks knowledge and industry before it
may be attempted, but in the end it is the critic, not the author, who is
judged by it, and, where his sympathies have been too narrow, or his
sight too dim, condemned without reprieve, and buried without a
tombstone.

Imperfect sympathy, that eternal vice of criticism, is sometimes
irremediable, sometimes caused by imperfect knowledge. It takes forms as
various as the authors whom it misjudges. In the case of Shakespeare,
when we attempt to estimate him, to gauge him, to see him from all sides,
we become almost painfully conscious of his immensity. We can build no
watch-tower high enough to give us a bird's-eye view of that "globe of
miraculous continents." We are out of breath when we attempt to accompany
him on his excursions, where he,

through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

He moves so easily and so familiarly among human passions and human
emotions, is so completely at home in all societies and all companies,
that he makes us feel hide-bound, prejudiced and ill-bred, by the side of
him. We have to widen our conception of human nature in order to think of
him as a man. How hard a thing it is to conceive of Shakespeare as of a
human spirit, embodied and conditioned, whose affections, though higher
mounted than ours, yet, when they stooped, stooped