ches, he never repeats
himself. No better proof could be given that the speaker is for the
moment not Shakespeare, but the character in which he has sunk himself.
We need not pretend that he does not sometimes run riot in his power;
yet, how seldom, in the day of his maturity, is that "sometimes," when
we rightly understand his meanings.

Let critics, observing always who speaks and in what spirit he speaks,
try to improve a word in a typical passage of Shakespeare. They speedily
realise the error of their ways.

Take at random the very simplest line, say: "How sweet the moonlight
sleeps upon this bank"; substitute some other word for "sweet" or
"sleeps," and examine the result. The very sound of the line possesses
the tone of the moonlight and the hour, the mood of Lorenzo and Jessica.
Try an easy-looking similitude:--

How like a younker or a prodigal
The scarfed bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind!
How like a prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind!

And, if the man who writes this nervous Saxon, writes elsewhere--

No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

that also is a lesson to those who have any notion of what is meant by
the right word in the right place.

To me Shakespeare is the most stupendously eloquent man who ever set pen
to paper. Shakespeare, says Goethe, offers us golden apples in silver
dishes. But Goethe was a foreigner, he perhaps hardly realised that the
dishes of English expression are, to the English reader who responds to
the niceties of his own tongue, not less golden than the apples.

To these perfections let us add another, his superb sense of rhythm.
Properly speaking, this is but an integral part of perfect eloquence. It
is the concern of the poet, not only to make the words express the
meaning, but to make the cadence express the tone and mood; to make it,
in fact, answer to those rhythmic vibrations of the brain which go with
all states of mental exaltation. It is Emerson who observes that
"Shakespeare's sonnets are like the tone of voice of some incomparable
person." He was doubtless thinking of their general effect upon our mood
and spirit, but his remark is true of the mere movement of Shakespeare's
lyric lines:--

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing