And through this expansion of his ethical consciousness what had he gained?  Not merely a fine insight as in Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, an insight which enables him to treat with comprehending sympathy even great criminals and traitors, but a high serenity and steady poise which enables him to write the romances of his last years—­Cymbeline, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.  He had come to feel that human life, after all, with its storms, is a little thing, a dream and a fata morgana, which soon must give place to a permanent reality: 

      We are such stuff
  As dreams are made of, and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep.

In 1904 Collin wrote in Nordisk Tidskrift foer Vetenskap, Konst och Industri[23] a most suggestive article on Hamlet.  He again dismisses the widely accepted theory of a period of gloom and increasing pessimism as baseless.  The long line of tragedies cannot be used to prove this.  They are the expression of a great poet’s desire to strengthen mankind in the battle of life.

[23:  This article is reprinted in Det Geniale Menneske above referred to.  It forms the second of a group of essays in which Collin analyzes the work of Shakespeare as the finest example of the true contribution of genius to the progress and culture of the race.  Preceding the study of Hamlet is a chapter called The Shakespearean Controversy, and following it is a study of Shakespeare the Man.  This is in three parts, the first of which is a reprint of an article in Samtiden (1901).

In Det Geniale Menneske Collin defines civilization as that higher state which the human race has attained by means of “psychic organs”—­superior to the physical organs.  The psychic organs have been created by the human intellect and they are controlled by the intellect.  Had man been dependent upon the physical organs solely, he would have remained an animal.  His psychic organs have enabled him to create instruments, tangible, such as tools and machines; intangible, such as works of art.  These are psychic organs and with their aid man has become a civilized being.

The psychic organs are the creation of the man of genius.  To create such organs is his function.  The characteristics, then, of the genius are an immense capacity for sympathy and an immense surplus of power; sympathy, that he may know the needs of mankind; power, that he may fashion those great organs of life by which the race may live and grow.

In the various chapters of his book, Collin analyzes in an illuminating way the life and work of Wergeland, Ibsen, and Bjornson as typical men of genius whose expansive sympathy gave them insight and understanding and whose indefatigable energy wrought in the light of their insight mighty psychic organs of cultural progress.