ow some doors wide open, that men and women may
unhindered enter. This essay aims to stand as a porter at the gate.
We shall never overestimate Shakespeare, because we can not. Some men
and things lie beyond the danger of hyperbole. No exaggeration is
possible concerning them, seeing they transcend all dreams. Space can
not be conceived by the most luxuriant imagination, holding, as it
does, all worlds, and capable of holding another universe besides, and
with room to spare. Clearly, we can not overestimate space. Thought
and vocabulary become bankrupt when they attempt this bewildering deed.
Genius is as immeasurable as space. Shakespeare can not be measured.
We can not go about him, since life fails, leaving the journey not
quite well begun. Yet may we attempt what can not be performed,
because each attempt makes us worthy, and we are measured, not by what
we achieve, but by what we attempt, as Lowell writes:

"Grandly begin! Though thou have time
But for one line, be that sublime:
Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

The eaglet's failure in attempted flight teaches him to outsoar clouds.
We are not so greatly concerned that we find the sources of the Nile as
that we search for them. In this lie our triumph and reward.

Besides all this, may there not be a place for more of what may be
named inspirational literature? Henry Van Dyke has coined a happy
phrase in giving title to his delightful volume on "The Poetry of
Tennyson," calling his papers "Essays in Vital Criticism." I like the
thought. Literature is life, always that, in so far as literature is
great; for literature tells our human story. Essayist, novelist, poet,
are all doing one thing, as are sculptor, painter, architect. Of
detail criticism ("dry-as-dust" criticism, to use Carlyle's term) there
is much, though none too much, which work requires scholarship and
painstaking, and is necessary. Malone is a requirement of
Shakespearean study. But, candidly, is verbal, textual criticism the
largest, truest criticism? Dust is not man, though man is dust. No
geologist's biography of the marble from Carrara, nor a biographer's
sketch of the sculptor, will explain the statue, nor do justice to the
artist's conception. I, for one, want to feel the poet's pulse-beat,
brain-beat, heart-beat. What does he mean? Let us catch this
speaker's words. What was that he said? Let me feel sure I have his
meaning. We may break a poem up into bi