The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream."

The celestial and the earthly are here so commingled,--commingled, but
not confounded,--that we see not where the one begins or the other
ends: so that in the reading we seem transported to a region where we
are strangers, yet old acquaintances; where all things are at once new
and familiar; the unearthly visions of the spot hardly touching us
with surprise, because, though wonderful indeed, there is nothing
about them but what readily finds or creates some answering powers and
sympathies within us. In other words, they do not surprise us, because
they at once kindle us into fellowship with them. That our thoughts
and feelings are thus at home with such things, and take pleasure in
them,--is not this because of some innate aptitudes and affinities of
our nature for a supernatural and celestial life?

"Point not these mysteries to an art
Lodg'd above the starry pole?"

THE WINTER'S TALE.

In Shakespeare's time there lived in London one Simon Forman, M.D., to
whom we are indebted for our earliest notice of THE WINTER'S TALE. He
was rather an odd genius, I should think; being an adept in occult
science and the arts of magic, and at the same time an ardent lover
of the stage; thus symbolizing at once with the most conservative and
the most radical tendencies of the age: for, strange as it may seem,
the Drama then led the van of progress; Shakespeare being even a more
audacious innovator in poetry and art than Bacon was in philosophy. Be
this as it may, Forman evidently took great delight in the theatre,
and he kept a diary of what he witnessed there. Not many years ago,
the manuscript of this diary was discovered by Mr. Collier in the
Ashmolean Museum, and a portion of its contents published. Forman was
at the Globe theatre on Wednesday, the 15th of May, 1611, and under
that date he records "how Leontes the King of Sicilia was overcome
with jealousy of his wife with the King of Bohemia, his friend that
came to see him, and how he contrived his death, and would have had
his cup-bearer poison him, who gave the King warning thereof, and fled
with him to Bohemia. Also, how he sent to the oracle of Apollo, and
the answer of Apollo was that she was guiltless; and except the child
was found again that was lost, the King should die without issue: for
the child was carried into Bohemia, and there laid in a forest, and
brought up by