mingling of divers speeches given them a language which is perhaps the
noblest vehicle of poetic thought that ever existed.

Had Shakspeare been born fifty years earlier, he would have been
cramped by a book-language, not yet flexible enough for the demands of
rhythmic emotion, not yet sufficiently popularized for the natural and
familiar expression of supreme thought, not yet so rich in metaphysical
phrase as to render possible that ideal representation of the great
passions which is the aim and end of Art, not yet subdued by practice
and general consent to a definiteness of accentuation essential to ease
and congruity of metrical arrangement. Had he been born fifty years
later, his ripened manhood would have found itself in an England
absorbed and angry with the solution of political and religious
problems, from which his whole nature was averse, instead of in that
Elizabethan social system, ordered and planetary in its functions and
degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite, where his
contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and brilliant
pictures, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which seems to
have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly sagacious--could draw
its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its lessons of prudence and
magnanimity. In estimating Shakspeare, it should never be forgotten,
that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and artist, and
incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions, sentiments, whose
character and results he delighted to watch and to reproduce, are those
of man in society as it existed; and it no more occurred to him to
question the right of that society to exist than to criticize the
divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with men as they
were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul as it is
shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of life, not
in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost. During the
first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of intellectual
interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather in the
region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual life. It
was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out of place.
Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare, found
breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of religious
speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the exactitudes
of sci