ne, over a nameless grave in the cemetery of Pere la
Chaise, let some angel sculptor chisel, "Here lies Jean Valjean, Hero."

II

Some Words on Loving Shakespeare

What a soul wants is to feel itself of service. Life's chances seem
drunk up like the dews from morning flowers in burning summer times.
To risk literary adventure after these centuries of thinking and saying
(and such thinking and such saying!), requires the audacity of a
simpleton or the boldness of the old discoverers. Every patch of
literary ground seems occupied, as those fertile valleys lifting from
sea-levels along a shining stream to the far hills and fair. So much
has been said on Shakespeare, and he has stung men to such profound and
fertile sayings, that to speak of him seems an impertinence. I have
never seen an essay on Shakespeare I have not run to read. Whoever
holds the cup, I will drain it dry, if filled with wine from this rare
vintage. Practically all our great writers have dreamed of him, and
told their dreams; and many a writer who makes no claim to greatness
has done the same. Some people you can not keep your eyes off of; and
of these Shakespeare is one. Who has n't talked of him? When Alfred
Tennyson lay dying in the white moonlight, his son tells how he held
the play of Cymbeline in his dying hands, as was fitting, seeing he had
held it in his living hands through many golden years. Than this dying
tribute, Shakespeare never had more gracious compliment paid his
genius. Who passes Shakespeare in his library without a caress of eye
or hand? I would apologize if I were guilty of such a breach of
literary etiquette. Boswell's Johnson edited Shakespeare; and Charles
Lamb and Goethe and DeQuincey and Coleridge and Taine and Lowell and
Carlyle and Emerson have written of him, some of them greatly. I
wonder Macaulay kept hands from him, but probably because he was the
historian of action rather than letters; and after reading what these
have said, how can one be but silenced?

But it has seemed to me that, while there was a wilderness of writing
about Shakespeare as a genius and as a whole, there was co-operative
dearth of writings on the individual dramas. Authors content
themselves with writing on the dramatist, and neglect to write upon the
dramas. If this be true, may there not be an unoccupied plot of ground
where a late-comer may pitch tent, as under the hemlocks by some
babbling water, and feel himself in som