he plants his famous mulberry-tree-he revisits all the haunts of his boyhood-he is found at one time presiding over his reapers, again frequenting the sales of corn and of malt, and anon attending the meetings of the magistrates of the little town-and in the evenings, according to his mood, he either hies to the ale-house and smokes his pipe and drinks his pot, and enjoys the humours of the Dogberries or the Slenders of the place, or when the spirit of inspiration is felt hovering near him, he shuts himself up in his chamber, and is heard, now in tragic tones uttering aloud the words in Lear— "Ye Heavens, if ye do love old men,

If ye yourselves are old,

Avenge me of my daughters,"

and now laughing "wild laughters three," as he cries with the cunning Autolycus in the Winter's Tale, "Oh, that I had never been born!" or sings to himself that immortal pedlar's inimitable doggrel

"Masks for faces and for noses," &c.

One day (it is mythically supposed by an ingenious writer) he is bilious, probably after a field-night with some of the Toby Belches of the town, and cannot write a bit. A Euphuist of his acquaintance has just called, and the poet confesses his plight, and proposes to remedy it by swallowing a pill. "What!" exclaims the Euphuist, "make the Swan of Avon dependent upon a drug. Insult to the immortal soul to suppose that aught so basely material is needed to clear its divine eyesight, or to quicken its heavenward flight!" "Nevertheless," rejoins Shakspeare, tapping the shoulder of his enthusiastic friend, "we'll try the pill;" and that very night the fair island of Miranda, the loveliest of all human imaginations, appears on his page, and glorifies it far more than if a shower of fairy gold had dropped on it from above. News, too, are ever and anon reaching him from the far city of the great triumphs of his other and his other new play; and his heart within him is glad. Occasional trips to London diversify his life, and thus, smoothly on the whole, glide away the last delightful years of this greatest of the sons of men.

Some calamities, indeed, there are to darken this bright tissue. In 1608 his good old mother died, and in 1613 his brother Richard. A fire in 1614 breaks out in the town, does great damage, and must excite Shakspeare's keen commiseration. He is found at this time busy about a project for the enclosure of the common fields of Stratford, and is consulted on that and other matters as the most public-spirited man in the town.

The year 1616 opens brightly with our poet. On the 10th of February, the bells of Stratford ring at the news of the marriage of his younger daughter, Judith, to Thomas Quiney. About this time, whether having a view to this marriage, or feeling some presentiments of approaching death, he draws out his last will, a copy of which is subjoined to this as to all former lives of Shakspeare. In this he has been thought to use his wife scandalously, "cutting her off not with a shilling, but with an old bed." But Knight has conclusively shown that she was otherwise and amply provided for, by the clear operation of the English law, having a life-interest of a third in her husband's houses, garden, and lands.

But now even the door of William Shakspeare must tremble at the knock of the postman of the Black River. The Myriadminded who "exhausted worlds, and then imagined new❞—who dealt with human life as a Creator, with the human heart as an angelic Witness-whose eye, if we dare use the expression, had run like a flame of fire through all the earth-Shakspeare must become a little lump of dust, as though a star were to be dissolved into a few dead ashes, the sport of every wind! And how died that mighty being? What was the mode of the "exit" of this Prince of Dramatists, and of men? It was, some think, in the character of Bardolph! A vicar of Stratford, writing forty-six years after, asserts that Shakspeare died of a fever contracted by a merry meeting held between him, Drayton, and Ben Jonson. Let us cling, however, to the hope that this story is one of the ten thousand floating lies told of celebrated men, and that with his heart, not overcharged with rioting and drunkenness, but in the full possession of his mighty faculties, and with all that humble reliance upon Christ,

which his will expresses, he (as Johnson so earnestly wished to do) "surrendered his soul to God, unclouded," and was accepted in the Beloved. It is a solemn, yet a cheering thought, that all men, even a Shakspeare, must enter into life by the one narrow way; that there is no royal road to heaven; and that as Moses had to take off his shoes in approaching the burning bush, as imperatively as had he been the veriest slave, so a Shakspeare must resign all his splendid faculties, and cast aside the magical buskins of his unparalleled art, and either as a little child enter the kingdom of God, or remain without. Cordially do we join with Charles Knight in trusting that "the closing scene was full of tranquillity and hope. It took place on the 23d of April 1616. He was fifty-three years of age. He died, it is supposed, on his birthday, and was buried, on the 25th of the month, in the north side of the great church in Stratford. The epitaph on his grave-the kind of monument erected over his ashes-the fate of his family-the history of his works-and his singularly majestic personal presence are all too familiar to all his readers to require any record here.

We have not left ourselves room for much criticism. On the general characteristics of his genius, or on his dramatic works, we are not called to enter, and surely the omission may be pardoned. But a few remarks will be permitted on the special question-how far are his leading qualities exhibited in his poems properly so called.

These principal faculties may be classed as universality, impersonality, imagination, wit, humour, and a knowledge of the springs of human action absolutely boundless. How are these displayed in Shakspeare's poetry? As the ocean is displayed in a little creek, and as the sun in a wave of water, they are there; but there, diminished in size and lessened in force and lustre. The "Venus and Adonis," "Lucrece," and the "Sonnets," bear a certain proportion to Shakspeare's general powers, and to his greater achievements; but not a proportion nearly so large as that between the "Comus" and "Lycidas" of Milton and his "Paradise Lost." Indeed, we fear that but for the popularity of his plays, his poetry had ere this been known

only as that of Quarles, Crashaw, and Donne is now known.
For Shakspeare's peculiar gift of universality, the power of
wide, total, and catholic vision, there was little scope in small
love poems, although glimpses of it appear particularly in the
"Sonnets." Impersonality, the purely dramatic power-the
power by which "his spirit loses its own selfish being, and
becomes a mighty organ through which Nature gives utterance
to the full diapason of her notes," and which Scott has finely
compared to the power of the Arabian magician, of shooting
his soul into different bodies, is visible especially in his “Venus
and Adonis," where, says Coleridge, "it is as if a superior
spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the
characters themselves, not only of every outward look and
act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest
thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view."
Coleridge adds, that this spirit is "meanwhile unparticipating
in the passions." This we venture to doubt. That Shak-
speare, indeed, participated to the full in the passions he imper-
sonated, is impossible, else he must have been at one time, as
mad as Lear; again, as jealous as Othello; and at a third, as
cruel as Escalus, in "Measure for Measure;" but that he pre-
served a thorough calm and neutrality of spirit, amidst all the
fiery bursts of love, anger, grief, insanity, ambition, and de-
spair, which his pen was inscribing, we cannot believe. How
could he be calm, while recording those awful howls of Othello,
"O, O, O!" or those reeling words of Lear-

"Darkness and devils, saddle my horses!
Call my train together!"

This were to make him either more or less, or something different from men, either a god or a demon, or a cool statuesque artist like Goethe, who seems a compound of the demon and the god, with very little of the man. But Shakspeare was intensely human; and without ascribing to him the volcanic heat and turbulence of a Byron, in his depiction of the human heart, we do ascribe to him a warm and strong sympathy with the very fiercest and most incontrollable of all the passions which he drew. Goethe paints as if the world and all its in

habitants were dead, and their blood and bones transformed into boxes of colours for his palette. Shakspeare draws from living figures, and with fingers that often tremble, a heart that often palpitates, and a brow that often flushes as he proceeds.

Wit and humour were out of the plan of his poems; but every page sparkles with that peculiar kind of imagination which not only sees images in series, but as forming a whole consentaneous picture, where, as in nature, every atom is a little, and every sun a large whole, and which not only descries general and obvious, but subtle and secret analogies. How fine such passages as

"Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a gaol of snow."

"Or ivory in an alabaster band.”

"The ornament of beauty is suspect,

A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air."

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."

"Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchymy."

His boundless knowledge of the human heart is conspicuous in the whole management of the passions of all the poems, as well as in those delicate "asides," which seem to slip unconsciously from his lips-those little traits which slide in as from some supernal hand on the canvas, and are as strange to the artist as to the spectators. Such Shakspearian touches abound especially in that otherwise crabbed and quaint production the "Rape of Lucrece."

"Venus and Adonis " must ever be admired for the exquisite linked melody of its verse, which reminds you of the waving of the wings of a swan of Leda, or of one of the doves of the Cyprian goddess herself, and for its numerous and vivid natural descriptions, some of them too natural, it must be confessed; and the "Rape of Lucrece," "A Lover's Complaint," &c., are remarkable for the rich Shakspearian matter; the