f National Epic. Marlborough,
you recollect, said, he knew no English History but what he had learned
from Shakspeare. There are really, if we look to it, few as memorable
Histories. The great salient points are admirably seized; all rounds
itself off, into a kind of rhythmic coherence; it is, as Schlegel says,
epic;--as indeed all delineation by a great thinker will be. There are
right beautiful things in those Pieces, which indeed together form one
beautiful thing. That battle of Agincourt strikes me as one of the
most perfect things, in its sort, we anywhere have of Shakspeare's. The
description of the two hosts: the worn-out, jaded English; the dread
hour, big with destiny, when the battle shall begin; and then that
deathless valor: "Ye good yeomen, whose limbs were made in England!"
There is a noble Patriotism in it,--far other than the "indifference"
you sometimes hear ascribed to Shakspeare. A true English heart
breathes, calm and strong, through the whole business; not boisterous,
protrusive; all the better for that. There is a sound in it like the
ring of steel. This man too had a right stroke in him, had it come to
that!

But I will say, of Shakspeare's works generally, that we have no full
impress of him there; even as full as we have of many men. His works are
so many windows, through which we see a glimpse of the world that was
in him. All his works seem, comparatively speaking, cursory, imperfect,
written under cramping circumstances; giving only here and there a note
of the full utterance of the man. Passages there are that come upon you
like splendor out of Heaven; bursts of radiance, illuminating the very
heart of the thing: you say, "That is _true_, spoken once and forever;
wheresoever and whensoever there is an open human soul, that will
be recognized as true!" Such bursts, however, make us feel that the
surrounding matter is not radiant; that it is, in part, temporary,
conventional. Alas, Shakspeare had to write for the Globe Playhouse:
his great soul had to crush itself, as it could, into that and no other
mould. It was with him, then, as it is with us all. No man works save
under conditions. The sculptor cannot set his own free Thought before
us; but his Thought as he could translate it into the stone that was
given, with the tools that were given. _Disjecta membra_ are all that we
find of any Poet, or of any man.

Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too
was a _