to feed the fire or the sunshine of the worlds of pure tragedy or
comedy. There is more play, more vibration as it were, in the splendours
of their spheres. Only in the heaven of Shakespeare's making can we pass
and repass at pleasure from the sunny to the stormy lights, from the
glory of _Cymbeline_ to the glory of _Othello_.

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