Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world; knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads:  that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life.  Shakspeare employed them as colors to compose his picture.  He rested in their beauty; and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely, to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts this power:—­what is that which they themselves say?  He converted the elements which waited on his command, into entertainments.  He was master of the revels to mankind.  Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comets given into his hand, or the planets and their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night, and advertise in all towns, “Very superior pyrotechny this evening”?  Are the agents of nature, and the power to understand them, worth no more than a street serenade, or the breath of a cigar?  One remembers again the trumpet-text in the Koran,—­“The heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest?” As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show.  But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does it profit me?  What does it signify?  It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Winter Evening’s Tale:  what signifies another picture more or less?  The Egyptian verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind; that he was a jovial actor and manager.  I cannot marry this fact to his verse.  Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast.  Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate:  but that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,—­that he should not be wise for himself;—­it must even go into the world’s history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement.

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, German and Swede, beheld the same objects:  they also saw through them that which was contained.  And to what purpose?  The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam’s fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them.