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Updated: June 22, 2025
Sadly and slowly I stemmed my course from among the heaps of slain, and, guided by the twinkling lights of the town, at length reached Rodosto. Lord Byron's Fourth Canto of Childe Harolde. Shakspeare's Sonnets.
A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato's brain, and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self, the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship.
It perfectly corresponds with Shakspeare's description, which Sir Joshua Reynolds has so happily illustrated, in one of his notes on our immortal poet: This castle hath a pleasant seat: the air Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself Unto our gentle sense, &c. Just as we came out of it, a raven perched on one of the chimney-tops, and croaked. Then I repeated ... The raven himself is hoarse.
Ben Jonson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself, out of all question, the better poet of the two. If it need wit to know wit, according to the proverb, Shakspeare's time should be capable of recognizing it.
Genius is in a certain sense infallible, and has nothing to learn; but art is to be learned, and must be acquired by practice and experience. In Shakspeare's acknowledged works we find hardly any traces of his apprenticeship, and yet apprenticeship he certainly had. This every artist must have, and especially in a period where he has not before him the examples of a school already formed.
My mind was still in a whirl as rapid as my wheels. Hope, doubt, and determination passed through my brain in quick succession, yet there was one thought that came, like Shakspeare's "delicate spirit," in all the tumult of soul, of which, like Ariel in the storm, it was the chief cause, to soothe and subdue me.
We should demand for a perfect editor, then, first, a thorough glossological knowledge of the English contemporary with Shakspeare; second, enough logical acuteness of mind and metaphysical training to enable him to follow recondite processes of thought; third, such a conviction of the supremacy of his author as always to prefer his thought to any theory of his own; fourth, a feeling for music, and so much knowledge of the practice of other poets as to understand that Shakspeare's versification differs from theirs as often in kind as in degree; fifth, an acquaintance with the world as well as with books; and last, what is, perhaps, of more importance than all, so great a familiarity with the working of the imaginative faculty in general, and of its peculiar operation in the mind of Shakspeare, as will prevent his thinking a passage dark with excess of light, and enable him to understand folly that the Gothic Shakspeare often superimposed upon the slender column of a single word, that seems to twist under it, but does not, like the quaint shafts in cloisters, a weight of meaning which the modern architects of sentences would consider wholly unjustifiable by correct principle.
And if another is still demanded, possibly it may be found in the fact, hostile to the perfect consecration of Shakspeare's memory, that after all he was a player.
'If you would find your bull, go seek him in the north, said the magician; and without querulously inquiring, like Shakspeare's Richard, what Taurus did in that region, the Mongols pursued a northern course, and by mere chance actually discovered the animal. Samdad was entertained for a week, and took his departure laden with butter and tea.
At every step I had to contend for the honor and independence of my islanders; so that early I came to understand the weight of Shakspeare's sentiment "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown!" O reader, do not laugh!
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