entitled "Shakespeare Once Again,"
printed in the first series entitled "Among My Books." Copyright,
1870, by James Russell Lowell. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company.]

We do not mean that great poetic geniuses may not have influenced
thought (tho we think it would be difficult to show how Shakespeare
had done so, directly and wilfully), but that they have not infected
contemporaries or followers with mannerism. The quality in him which
makes him at once so thoroughly English and so thoroughly cosmopolitan
is that aeration of the understanding by the imagination which he has
in common with all the greater poets, and which is the privilege of
genius. The modern school, which mistakes violence for intensity,
seems to catch its breath when it finds itself on the verge of natural
expression, and to say to itself, "Good heavens! I had almost
forgotten I was inspired!" But of Shakespeare we do not even suspect
that he ever remembered it. He does not always speak in that intense
way that flames up in Lear and Macbeth through the rifts of a soil
volcanic with passion. He allows us here and there the repose of a
commonplace character, the consoling distraction of a humorous one. He
knows how to be equable and grand without effort, so that we forget
the altitude of thought to which he has led us, because the slowly
receding slope of a mountain stretching downward by ample gradations
gives a less startling impression of height than to look over the edge
of a ravine that makes but a wrinkle in its flank.

Shakespeare has been sometimes taxed with the barbarism of profuseness
and exaggeration. But this is to measure him by a Sophoclean scale.
The simplicity of the antique tragedy is by no means that of
expression, but is of form merely. In the utterance of great passions
something must be indulged to the extravagance of Nature; the subdued
tones to which pathos and sentiment are limited can not express a
tempest of the soul. The range between the piteous "no more but so,"
in which Ophelia compresses the heartbreak whose compression was to
make her mad, and that sublime appeal of Lear to the elements of
nature, only to be matched, if matched at all, in the "Prometheus," is
a wide one, and Shakespeare is as truly simple in the one as in the
other. The simplicity of poetry is not that of prose, nor its
clearness that of ready apprehension merely. To a subtile sense, a
sense heightened by sympathy, those sudden fervors of phrase, g