A Study of Shakespeare eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 257 pages of information about A Study of Shakespeare.

A Study of Shakespeare eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 257 pages of information about A Study of Shakespeare.

In this first group of four—­wholly differing on that point from the later constellation of three—­there is but very seldom, not more than once or twice at most, a shooting or passing gleam of anything more lurid or less lovely than “a light of laughing flowers.”  There is but just enough of evil or even of passion admitted into their sweet spheres of life to proclaim them living:  and all that does find entrance is so tempered by the radiance of the rest that we retain but softened and lightened recollections even of Shylock and Don John when we think of the Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing; we hardly feel in As You Like It the presence or the existence of Oliver and Duke Frederick; and in Twelfth Night, for all its name of the midwinter, we find nothing to remember that might jar with the loveliness of love and the summer light of life.

No astronomer can ever tell which if any one among these four may be to the others as a sun; for in this special tract of heaven “one star differeth” not “from another star in glory.”  From each and all of them, even “while this muddy vesture of decay doth grossly close [us] in,” we cannot but hear the harmony of a single immortal soul

   Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.

The coincidence of the divine passage in which I have for once permitted myself the freedom of altering for quotation’s sake one little word, with a noble excerpt given by Hallam from the Latin prose writings of Campanella, may recall to us with a doubly appropriate sense of harmonious fitness the subtly beautiful image of Lord Tennyson;—­

   Star to star vibrates light:  may soul to soul
   Strike thro’ a finer element of her own?

Surely, if ever she may, such a clash might we fancy to have passed from the spirit of the most glorious martyr and poet to the spirit of the most glorious poet and artist upon the face of the earth together.  Even to Shakespeare any association of his name with Campanella’s, as even to Campanella any association of his name with Shakespeare’s, cannot but be an additional ray of honour:  and how high is the claim of the divine philosopher to share with the godlike dramatist their common and crowning name of poet, all Englishmen at least may now perceive by study of Campanella’s sonnets in the noble and exquisite version of Mr. Symonds; to whom among other kindred debts we owe no higher obligation than is due to him as the giver of these poems to the inmost heart of all among his countrymen whose hearts are worthy to hold and to hoard up such treasure.

Where nothing at once new and true can be said, it is always best to say nothing; as it is in this case to refrain from all reiteration of rhapsody which must have been somewhat “mouldy ere” any living man’s “grandsires had nails on their toes,” if not at that yet remoter date “when King Pepin of France was a little boy” and “Queen Guinever of Britain was a little

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A Study of Shakespeare from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.