Shakspere smiles and is still. I
love the smiles of his wiser years; but they would never have been so
calmly content, so cheering with all their inscrutable depth, had not
the man been weighed down with some dark sorrow before his soul was
rescued and purified. I do not care for him when he is grinning and
merry. He could play the buffoon when he willed--and a very unpleasant
buffoon he was in his day; but Sorrow claimed him, and he came forth
purified to speak to us by Prospero's lips. He had his struggle to
compass resignation, he even seems to have felt himself degraded, and
there is almost a weak complaint in that terrible sonnet, "No longer
mourn for me when I am dead;" but his heart-strings held; he kept his
dignity at the last, and he gave us the splendours of "The Tempest." I
have no manner of superstition about the great poet--indeed I feel
sure that at one time of his life he was what we call a bad man, his
self-reproaches hinting all too plainly at forms of wickedness, moral
wickedness, which pass far beyond the ordinary vice which society
condemns--but I am sure that he became as good as he was serene; and I
like to trace the phases of his sorrow up to the time of his triumph.
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