mere piece of stage scenery; to the real sentiment belongs the frank
paganism of Hamlet as he holds the skull,--_this_ is the end of Yorick,
and that anything of Yorick may still live except these mouldering bones
does not even occur to Hamlet as a question. Yet when he is tempted to
take refuge in suicide, the possibility of "something after death" is
sufficient to deter him. The thought suggests no hope, only a vague
restraining fear. But to the guilty king there is a terrible reality in
the divine law which he has broken; he struggles to reconcile himself
with heaven, but his will seems paralyzed to retrace the path of
wrong-doing. The incapable will, the baffled intellect, cast a gloom
over the whole drama.

It is not only a clew to man's relation with the unseen and eternal that
we miss in Shakspere. He fails to show one trait which belongs to human
nature as truly as Hotspur's courage or Falstaff's drollery. He nowhere
depicts a life controlled by a moral ideal, deliberately chosen and
resolutely pursued. His world is rich in passion, but deficient in clear
and high purpose and soldierly resolve. The metal of mastery is lacking.
He shows us life as a wonderful spectacle, but he does not directly aid
us to live our own life. His amazing treasury of wisdom seldom lends a
phrase that flashes comfort into our sorrow, hope into our dejection, or
strength to our wavering will.

Yet when this has been said, it remains true that Shakspere's atmosphere
is wholesome and even invigorating. We are helped in our higher life by
many influences besides direct moral teaching. One takes a twenty-mile
tramp over moor and mountain, and no word of admonition or guidance comes
from rock or tree, but he comes back stronger and serener. So from an
hour among Shakspere's people one may well emerge with a fuller, happier
being. It is the inscrutable power of real life truly seen, even though
seen but in part.

The wish is as inevitable as it is hopeless that we might know the
personality of Shakspere, the medium through which the light passing was
thus colored. We get but rare and slight glimpses; the boyhood in the
sweet Avon country; the stumble on the threshold of manhood in his
marriage; the plunge into roaring London; the theatrical surroundings;
the great encompassing drama of Elizabeth's England; the slow winning of
a competence; the quiet years at the end, a burgess of Stratford town.
There is a rich, tantalizing d