his successive productions.
His youthful poem, "Venus and Adonis," is touched with the disease which
had blighted the literature and the life of southern Europe,--the
infection of the imagination by sensuality, a sort of intellectual
putrescence. In the frank daylight of the early dramas this nightmare
has disappeared, yet in the generally clean atmosphere there occurs
sometimes a touch of depraved Italian manners, as in "All's Well that
Ends Well," the deliberate seduction attempted by Bertram, bringing
little discredit and no punishment. Later in the great plays the note of
chastity is always clear and firm. In his women, purity is nobly
depicted; in his men there appears no such attainment, but often a
passionate abhorrence of vice. In only one play, "Antony and Cleopatra,"
it might superficially appear that there is a glorification of lawless
love; but in the action of the story their lawlessness ruins Antony's and
Cleopatra's fortunes; then, with the imminence of death, their passion,
escaping from the thralldom of flesh, soars into a sublimation that
redeems Antony's error and half transforms Cleopatra.

In Shakspere's world the supernatural sanctions have almost disappeared,
but the moral law is still supreme. Yet in some ways it is a very
unsatisfying world. In its deeper aspects woe predominates over joy.
All phases of suffering and anguish find their language here; but of
rapture there are only transient glimpses, of great and abiding happiness
there is almost none, and there is scarcely a suggestion of "the peace
that passeth understanding." We sometimes feel the sharpest pressure of
the problems to which Christianity had addressed itself, unlightened by
any solution. There is the echo of Paul's cry, "O wretched man that I
am, who shall deliver me from this body of death!"--as in the king at
prayer, in "Hamlet;" but nowhere is Paul's note of triumphant
deliverance. We see men overwhelmed by temptation, as Macbeth and
Angelo; we nowhere see men rising over conquered temptation to higher
manhood. Man in Shakspere is generally the creature of Fate. Man's
confrontal by the mystery of existence is the real theme of "Hamlet."
The true unity of that drama is not in the action nor in the characters;
it is the underlying and unanswered problem,--man, in his finest
sensibilities and noblest aspirations, beset by a world of trouble, of
confusion, of unfathomable mystery. The ghost from the other world is a