e them. Life laughs on greeting him;
the grave grows dim to sight when he is near, and you see the deep sky
instead, and across it wheel wild birds in happy motion. In Tennyson
is perpetual melancholy--the mood and destiny of poetry, as I
suppose--but Shakespeare is not melancholy, nor does he know how to be.
His face is never sad, I think, and he is fonder of Jack Falstaff than
we are apt to suppose; for health riots in his blood. He weeps, smiles
breaking through his weeping, and he turns from the grave of tragedy
with laughter leaning from his eyes. Aeschylus is a poet whose face
was never lit even with the candle-light of smiles; but Shakespeare,
writer of tragedy, is our laughing poet. This plainly confounds our
philosophy of poetry, since humor is not poetry; but he binds humor to
his car as Achilles, Hector, and laughs at our upset philosophies,
crying: "This is my Lear, weep for him; this my Hamlet, break your
hearts for him; this my Desdemona, grow tender for her woe,--but
enough: this is my Rosalind and my Miranda, my Helena and Hermione, my
Orlando and Ferdinand, my Bassanio and Leontes; laugh with them"--and
you render swift obedience, saying, with Lord Boyet, in "Love's Labor
Lost,"

"O, I am stabbed with laughter!"

He is court jester, at whose quips the generations make merry. You can
not be somber nor sober long with him, though he is deep as seas, and
fathomless as air, and lonely as night, and sad betimes as autumn. He
is not frivolous, but is joyous. The bounding streams, the singing
trees, the leaping stags along the lake, the birds singing morning
awake,--Shakespeare incorporates all these in himself. He is what may
be named, in a spiritual sense, this world's animal delight in life.
There is a view of life sullen as November; and to be sympathetic with
this mood is to ruin life and put out all its lights. Shakespeare's
resiliency of spirit would teach us what a dispassionate study of our
own nature would have taught us, that to succumb to this gloom is not
natural; to feel the weight of burdens all the time would conduct to
insanity or death; therefore has God made bountiful provision against
such outcome in the lift of cloud and lightening of burden. We forget
sleep is God's rest-hour for spirit; and, besides, we read in God's
Book how, "at eventide, it shall be light," an expression at once of
exquisite poetry and acute observation. Our lives are healthy when
natural. The crude