had been those of taste and morals, he would have done so much to make men hate and misunderstand each other, so much to destroy the very sentiment of humanity, that he would have earned the distinction of being the greatest satirist and the worst man that ever lived. But instead, how humanely he clings to the most unpromising forms of human nature, insists on their right to speak for themselves as much as if they were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Buckinghams, and does for them what he might have desired should be done for himself had he been Dogberry, or Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the rest! The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben Jonson's plays, excite only contempt or disgust. Shakespeare takes the same materials as Ben, passes them through the medium of his imaginative humor, and changes them into subjects of the most soul-enriching mirth. Their actual prototypes would not be tolerated; but when his genius shines on them, they "lie in light" before our humorous vision. It must be admitted that in his explorations of the lower levels of human nature he sometimes touches the mud deposits; still, he never hisses or jeers at the poor relations through Adam he there discovers, but magnanimously gives them the wink of consanguinity.

This is one extreme of his genius, the poetic com

prehension and embodiment of the low. What was the other extreme? How high did he mount in the ideal region, and what class of his characters represents his loftiest flight? It is commonly asserted that his supernatural beings, his ghosts, spectres, witches, fairies, and the like, exhibiting his command of the dark side and the bright side, the terror and the grace, of the supernatural world, indicate his rarest quality; for in these, it is said, he went out of human nature itself, and created beings that never existed. Wonderful as these are, we must recollect that in them he worked on a basis of popular superstitions, on a mythology as definite as that of Greece and Rome, and though he recreated instead of copying his materials, though he Shakespearianized them, he followed the same process of his genius in delineating Hecate and Titania as in delineating Dame Quickly and Anne Page. All his characters, from the rogue Autolycus to the heavenly Cordelia, are in a certain sense ideal; but the question now relates to the rarity of the elements, and the height of the mood, and not merely to the action of his mind; and we think that the characters technically called supernatural which appear in his works are much nearer the earth than others which, though they lack the name, have more of the spiritual quality of the thing. The highest form of the supernatural is to be found in the purest, highest, most beautiful souls.

Did it never strike you, in reading The Tempest, that Ariel is not so supernatural as Miranda? We may be sure that Ferdinand so thought, in that rapture of wonder when her soul first shone on him through her innocent eyes; and afterwards, when he asks,

"I do beseech you

(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers)

What is your name?"

And doubtless there was a more marvellous melody in her voice than in the mysterious magical music

"That crept by him upon the waters,

Allaying both their fury and his passion
With its sweet air."

Shakespeare, indeed, in his transcendently beautiful embodiments of feminine excellence, the most exquisite creations in literature, passed into a region of sentiment and thought, of ideals and of ideas, altogether higher and more supernatural than that region in which he shaped his delicate Ariels and his fairy Titanias. The question has been raised whether sex extends to soul. However this may be decided, here is a soul, with its records in literature, who is at once the manliest of men, and the most womanly of women; who can not only recognize the feminine element in existing individuals, but discern the idea, the pattern, the radiant genius, of

sons.

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

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