e real way proprietary? I have
discovered a growing feeling in my thought that enough has not been
said, and can not be said, about the Macbeths and Tempests and Lears
and Hamlets.

Shakespeare is too massive to be discussed in an hour. One essay will
not suffice for him. He is as a mountain, whose majesty and
multitudinous beauty, meaning, and magnitude and impress, must be
gotten by slow processes in journeying about it through many days. Who
sits under its pines at noon, lies beside its streams for rest, walks
under its lengthening shadows as under a cloud, and has listened to the
voices of its waterfalls, thrilling the night and calling to the
spacious firmament as if with intent to be heard "very far off," has
thus learned the mountain, vast of girth, kingly in altitude, perpetual
in sovereignty. We study a world's circumference by segments; nor let
us suppose we can do other by this cosmopolitan Shakespeare. He, so
far as touches our earth horizon, is ubiquitous. Looking at him
sum-totally, we _feel_ his mass, and say we have looked upon majesty.
But as a mountain is, in circumference and altitude, always beckoning
us on, as if saying, "My summit is not far away, but near," and so
spurring our laggard steps to espouse the ascent, and toiling on, on,
still on, a little further--only a little further--till heart and flesh
all but fail and faint, but for the might of will, we fall to rise
again, and try once more, till we fall upon the summit, and lie on
thresholds leading to the stars. The mountain understated its
magnitude to us--not of intent, but in simple modesty. I think it did
not itself know its mass. Greatness has a subtle self-depreciation;
and we shall come to know our huge Shakespeare only by approaching him
on foot. He must be studied in fragments. His plays, if I may be
pardoned for coining a word, need not an omnigraph, but monographs.
Let Shakespeare be, and give eye and ear to his history, comedy,
tragedy; and when we have done with them, one by one, we shall discover
how the aggregated mass climbs taller than highest mountains. This
method, in tentative fashion, I propose to apply in some studies in
this volume, or other volumes, believing that the company of those who
love Shakespeare can never be large enough for his merits, and that
many are kept away from the witchery of him because they do not well
know the fine art of approaching him. I would, therefore, be a
doorkeeper, and thr