n of
Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "smothers her with
painting." Now Imogen's wrath first reduces the light woman to the most
contemptible of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and
then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, annihilates her
very being with the swift thought that the paint on her cheeks is her
mother,--that she is nothing but the mere creation of painting, a
phantom born of a color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to
show that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women are as
individual as their dispositions.

And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul! Within the immense
space which stretches between Dogberry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or
Cordelia, lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever exhibited such
philosophic comprehensiveness, but philosophic comprehensiveness is
often displayed apart from creative comprehensiveness, and along the
whole vast line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations that
Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were vital, his
insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in forms. And now was he proud
of his transcendent superiorities? Did he think that he had exhausted
all that can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of the
soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undiscovered and undiscerned
regions of existence was never felt with more reverent humility than by
this discoverer, who had seen in rapturous vision so many new worlds
open on his view. In the play which perhaps best indicates the ecstatic
action of his mind, and which is alive in every part with that fiery
sense of unlimited power which the mood of ecstasy gives,--in the play
of "Antony and Cleopatra," he has put into the mouth of the Soothsayer
what seems to have been his own modest judgment of the extent of his
glance into the universe of matter and mind:--

"In Nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read!"

LONGFELLOW'S TRANSLATION OF DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA.

In the North American Review for March, 1809, we read of Cary's Dante:
"This we can pronounce, with confidence, to be the most literal
translation in poetry in our language."

"As to Cary," writes Prescott in 1824, "I think Dante would have given
him a place in his ninth heaven, if he could have foreseen his
translation. It is most astonishing, giving not only the literal
corresponding phrase, but the spirit of the original, the t