That imagination which dilates the closet he writes in to the world’s dimension, crowds it with agents in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon.  These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green-room.  Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream admits me?  Did Shakspeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Stratford, the genesis of that delicate creation?  The forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, the moonlight of Portia’s villa, “the antres vast and desarts idle” of Othello’s captivity,—­where is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancellor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets?  In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art,—­in the Cyclopaean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scotland,—­the Genius draws up the ladder after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives way to a new age, which sees the works and asks in vain for a history.

Shakspeare is the only biographer of Shakspeare; and even he can tell nothing, except to the Shakspeare in us,—­that is, to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour.  He cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations.  Read the antique documents extricated, analysed and compared by the assiduous Dyce and Collier; and now read one of these skyey sentences,—­aerolites,—­which seem to have fallen out of heaven, and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as words of fate, and tell me if they match—­if the former account in any manner for the latter; or which gives the most historical insight into the man.

Hence, though our external history is so meagre, yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information which is material; that which describes character and fortune; that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know.  We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart,—­on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them; on the characters of men, and the influences, occult and open, which affect their fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and which yet interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours.  Who ever read the volume of the Sonnets without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, and, at the same time, the most intellectual of men?  What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas?  One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman