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womanhood itself, as it hovers, unseen by other eyes, over the living representatives of the sex. Literature boasts many eminent female poets and novelists; but not one has ever approached Shakespeare in the purity, the sweetness, the refinement, the elevation, of his perceptions of feminine character, much less approached him in the power of embodying these perceptions in perThese characters are so thoroughly domesticated on the earth, that we are tempted to forget the heaven of invention from which he brought them. The most beautiful of spirits, they are the most tender of daughters, lovers, and wives. They are "airy shapes," but they "syllable men's names." Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia, Viola, Perdita, Miranda, Desdemona, Hermione, Portia, Isabella, Imogen, Cordelia, - if their names do not call up their natures, the most elaborate analysis of criticism will be of no avail. Do you say that these women are slightly idealized portraits of actual women? Was Cordelia, for example, simply a good, affectionate daughter of a foolish old king? To Shakespeare himself she evidently " partook of divineness”; and he hints of the still ecstasy of contemplation in which her nature first rose upon his imagination, when, speaking through the lips of a witness of her tears, he hallows them as they fall:

"She shook

The holy water from her heavenly eyes."

And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion arè different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with the faculty, and is, steeped in the atmosphere, of imagination; but who could mistake the imagination of Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen? the loitering, lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating whatever it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, the flash and the bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps the most completely expressed of Shakespeare's women; for in her every faculty and affection is fused with imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is combined with vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind darts in an instant to the ultimate of everything. After she has parted with her husband, she does not merely say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, and in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up,

she goes up: she would have charged him, she says,

"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,

T'encounter me with orisons, for then

I am in heaven for him."

When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possi

ble object of his sensual whim is at once consumed in the fire that leaps from her impassioned lips : —

"Some jay of Italy,

Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him."

Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive action of Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "who smothers her with painting." Now Imogen's wrath first reduces the light woman to the most contemptible of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, annihilates her very being with the swift thought that the paint on her cheeks is her mother, that she is nothing but the mere creation of painting, a phantom born of a color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to show that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women are as individual as their dispositions.

And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul! Within the immense space which stretches between Dogberry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or Cordelia, lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever exhibited such philosophic comprehensiveness; but philosophic comprehensiveness is often displayed apart from creative comprehensiveness, and along the whole vast line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations over which Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were vital, his insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in forms. And now, was he proud of his transcendent superiorities? Did he think that he had exhausted all that

can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of the soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undiscovered and undiscerned regions of existence was never felt with more reverent humility than by this discoverer, who had seen in rapturous visions so many new worlds open on his view. In the play which perhaps best ex

hibits the ecstatic action of his mind, and which is alive in every part with that fiery sense of unlimited power which the mood of ecstasy gives, in the play of Antony and Cleopatra, he has put into the mouth of the Soothsayer what seems to have been his own modest judgment of the extent of his glance into the universe of matter and mind : —

"In nature's infinite book of secrecy

A little I can read!"

BEN JONSON.

AUTHORS are apt to be popularly considered as

physically a feeble folk, — as timid, nervous, dyspeptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the rough realities of life. We shall endeavor here to present the image of one calculated to reverse this impression, the image of a stalwart man of letters, who lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age of English literature, who undeniably had brawny fists as well as forgetive faculties, who could handle a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a bullet as surely as with a word, and a sort of cross between the bully and the bard — could shoulder his way through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man, Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled" Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is "Saxon" England in epitome, John Bull passing from a name into a man, a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineer

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