st child:--

"O Helicanus, strike me, honored sir!
Give me a gash; put me to present pain;
Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me,
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness."

If, as is probable, "Venus and Adonis" was written as early as 1586, we
may suppose that the plays which represent the boyhood of his genius,
and which are strongly marked with the characteristics of that poem,
namely, "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the first draft of "Love's
Labor's Lost," and the original "Romeo and Juliet," were produced before
the year 1592. Following these came "King Richard III.," "King Richard
II.," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "King John," "The Merchant of
Venice," and "King Henry IV.," all of which we know were written before
1598, when Shakespeare was in his thirty-fourth year. During the next
eight years he produced "King Henry V.," "The Merry Wives of Windsor,"
"As You Like It," "Hamlet," "Twelfth Night," "Measure for Measure,"
"Othello," "Macbeth," and "King Lear." In this list are the four great
tragedies in which his genius culminated. Then came "Troilus and
Cressida," "Timon of Athens," "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra,"
"Cymbeline," "King Henry VIII.," "The Tempest," "The Winter's Tale," and
"Coriolanus." If heed be paid to this order of the plays, it will be
seen at once that a quotation from Shakespeare carries with it a very
different degree of authority, according as it refers to the youth or
the maturity of his mind.

Indeed, when we reflect that between the production of "The Two
Gentlemen of Verona" and "King Lear" there is only a space of fifteen
years, we must admit that the history of the human intellect presents no
other example of such marvellous progress; and if we note the giant
strides by which it was made, we shall find that they all imply a
progressive widening and deepening of soul, a positive growth of the
nature of the man, until in Lear the power became supreme and becomes
amazing. Mr. Verplanck considers the period when he produced his four
great tragedies to be the period of his intellectual grandeur, as
distinguished from an earlier period which he thinks shows the
perfection of his merely poetic and imaginative power; but the fact
would seem to be that his increasing greatness as a philosopher was
fully matched by his increasing greatness as a poet, and that in the
devouring swiftness of his onward and upward movement imagina