we cannot help thinking
also of how much healthy mental activity this one man has been the
occasion, how much good he has indirectly done to society by withdrawing
men to investigations and habits of thought that secluded them from
baser attractions, for how many he has enlarged the circle of study and
reflection; since there is nothing in history or politics, nothing in
art or science, nothing in physics or metaphysics, that is not sooner or
later taxed for his illustration. This is partially true of all great
minds, open and sensitive to truth and beauty through any large arc
of their circumference; but it is true in an unexampled sense of
Shakspeare, the vast round of whose balanced nature seems to have been
equatorial, and to have had a southward exposure and a summer sympathy
at every point, so that life, society, statecraft serve us at last but
as commentaries on him, and whatever we have gathered of thought, of
knowledge, and of experience, confronted with his marvellous page,
shrinks to a mere footnote, the stepping-stone to some hitherto
inaccessible verse. We admire in Homer the blind placid mirror of the
world's young manhood, the bard who escapes from his misfortune in poems
all memory, all life and bustle, adventure and picture; we revere in
Dante that compressed force of lifelong passion which could make a
private experience cosmopolitan in its reach and everlasting in its
significance; we respect in Goethe the Aristotelian poet, wise by
weariless observation, witty with intention, the stately _Geheimerrath_
of a provincial court in the empire of Nature. As we study these, we
seem in our limited way to penetrate into their consciousness and to
measure and master their methods;--but with Shakspeare it is just the
other way; the more we have familiarized ourselves with the operations
of our own consciousness, the more do we find, in reading him, that
he has been beforehand with us, and that, while we have been vainly
endeavoring to find the door of his being, he has searched every nook
and cranny of our own. While other poets and dramatists embody isolated
phases of character and work inward from the phenomenon to the special
law which it illustrates, he seems in some strange way unitary with
human nature itself, and his own soul to have been the law- and
life-giving power of which his creations are only the phenomena. We
justify or criticize the characters of other writers by our memory and
experience, and