earth with
primroses, flowers and hawthorn blossoms, he rambled over domestic and
foreign lands, through fields, forests, mountains and stormy seas.

With the fun of Falstaff, the firmness of Caesar, the generosity of King
Lear and the imagination of Hamlet, Shakspere also possessed the love-lit
delicacy of Ophelia, Portia and Juliet, reveling familiarly with the
spirits of water, earth and air, in his kingdom of living ghosts. He
borrowed words and ideas from all the ancient philosophers, poets and story
tellers, and shoveling them, pell-mell, into the furnace fires of his
mammoth brain, fused their crude ore, by the forced draught of his fancy,
into the laminated steel of enduring form and household utility.

The rough and uncouth corn of others passed through the hoppers of
Shakspere's brain and came out fine flour, ready for use by the theatrical
bakers. With the pen of pleasure and brush of fancy he painted human life
in everlasting colors, that will not fade or tarnish with age or wither
with the winds of adversity. The celestial sunlight of his genius permeated
every object he touched and lifted even the vulgar vices of earth into the
realms of virtue and beauty.

Shakspere was an intellectual atmosphere that permeated and enlivened the
world of thought. His genius was as universal as the air, where zephyr and
storm moved at the imperial will of this Grand Master of human passions.

Principles, not people, absorbed the mammoth mind of Shakspere, who paid
little attention to the princes and philosophers of his day. Schools,
universities, monks, priests and popes were rungs in the ladder of his
mind, and only noticed to scar and satirize their hypocrisy, bigotry and
tyranny with his javelins of matchless wit. The flower and fruit of thought
sprang spontaneously from his seraphic soul.

He flung his phrases into the intellectual ocean of thought, and they still
shine and shower down the ages like meteors in a midnight sky. Like the
busy bee, he banqueted on all the blossoms of the globe and stored the
honey of his genius in the lofty crags of Parnassus.

Shakspere and Nature were confidential friends, and, while she gave a few
sheaves of knowledge to her other children, the old Dame bestowed upon the
"Divine" William the harvest of all the ages.

Shakspere's equipoise of mind, placidity of conduct and control of passion
rendered him invulnerable to the shafts of envy, malice and tyranny, making
him always mast