Byronic misanthropy, even though assumed, finds no
favor in Shakespeare's eyes.

Shakespeare is this world's poet--a truth hinted at before, but now
needing amplifying a trifle. There is in him this-worldliness, but not
other-worldliness, his characters not seeming to the full to have a
sense of the invisible world. He is love's poet. His lovers are
imperishable because real. He is love's laureate. Yet are his loves
of this world. True, there are spurts of flight, as of an eagle with
broken wing, when, as in Hamlet, he faults this world and aspires
skyward, yet does not lose sight of the earth, and, like the wounded
eagle in "Sohrab and Rustum," lies at last

"A heap of fluttering feathers."

Plainly, Shakespeare was a voyager in this world, and a discoverer,
sailing all seas and climbing tallest altitudes to their far summits;
but flight was not native to him, as if he had said:

"We have not wings, we can not soar;
But we have feet to scale, and climb."

I can not think him spiritual in the gracious sense. His contemporary,
Edmund Spenser, was spiritual, as even Milton was not. This world made
appeal to this poet of the Avon on the radiant earthly side; the very
clouds flamed with a glory borrowed from the sun as he looked on them.
His world was very fair. In more than a poetic sense was

"All the world a stage."

Life was a drama, hastening, shouting, exhilarating, turbulent, free,
roistering, but as triumphant as Elizabeth's fleet and God's stormy
waters were over Philip's great Armada. Hamlet was the terribly tragic
conception in Shakespeare because he was hopeless. Can you conceive
Shakespeare writing "In Memoriam?" Tennyson was pre-eminently
spiritual, and "In Memoriam" is his breath dimming the window-pane on
which he breathed. That was Tennyson's life, but was patently no brave
part of Shakespeare. He knew to shape tragedy, such as Romeo and
Juliet; but how to send abroad a cry like Enoch Arden's prayer lay not
in him. He compassed our world, but found no way to leave what proved
a waterlogged ship; and how to pilot to

"The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
No traveler returns,"

puzzles Shakespeare's will as it had Hamlet's.

So not even our great Shakespeare can monopolize life. Some landscapes
have not lain like a picture beneath his eyes; he did not exhaust
poetry nor life, and room is still left for

"New men, strange faces, other minds,"

for who