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The next day's rising sun shone upon Stratford-on-Avon; and here revived in some degree my Shakspearian mania, to the still higher exaltation of my English stilts, and the deeper debasement of all "rough Irish kernes."
Scarce a commentator of them all, for more than a hundred years, but thought, as Alphonso of Castile did of Creation, that, if he had only been at Shakspeare's elbow, he could have given valuable advice; scarce one who did not know off-hand that there was never a seaport in Bohemia, as if Shakspeare's world were one which Mercator could have projected; scarce one but was satisfied that his ten finger-tips were a sufficient key to those astronomic wonders of poise and counterpoise, of planetary law and cometary seeming-exception, in his metres; scarce one but thought he could gauge like an ale-firkin that intuition whose edging shallows may have been sounded, but whose abysses, stretching down amid the sunless roots of Being and Consciousness, mock the plummet; scarce one but could speak with condescending approval of that prodigious intelligence so utterly without congener that our baffled language must coin an adjective to qualify it, and none is so audacious as to say Shakspearian of any other.
In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust.
"There is not a page in this volume on which we cannot find some novel image, some Shakspearian felicity of expression, or some striking simile," said the critic of the "Westminster Review."
The first was a series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps." These were patches of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging creepers, where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could not grow, but all was bare and blasted.
I had already borrowed your second volume. What pleases one most is "The Song of Lucy.". Simon's sickly Daughter, in "The Sexton," made me cry. Next to these are the description of these continuous echoes in the story of "Joanna's Laugh," where the mountains and all the scenery absolutely seem alive; and that fine Shakspearian character of the "happy man" in the "Brothers,"
Had the passage been in verse, where the change might have damaged the rhythm, had it been one of those ecstasies of Shakspearian imagination, to tamper with which because we could not understand it would be Bottom-like presumption, one of those tempests of passion where every word reeks hot and sulphurous, like a thunderstone new-fallen, in any of these cases we should have agreed with Mr.
The libretto was prepared by the accomplished Italian scholar and musician, Arrigo Boito, and closely follows the story of the Shakspearian tragedy. The curtain rises upon a scene in Cyprus. A storm is raging, and a crowd, among them Iago, Cassio, and Roderigo, watch the angry sea, speculating upon the fate of Othello's vessel, which finally arrives safely in port amid much rejoicing.
Mill; and in this particular instance and prologue the names of the improvidents are Leone and Ubaldo, neither of which, if my memory serve me, is Shakspearian.
The Una of Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let not the reader imagine for an instant that any prototype in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there.
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