years flowed out in a series of plays that were poems of the highest order. Within six years the wandering rustic from Stratford had become the first of all modern poets. Soft and humorous as Chaucer, a painter of heroic or gentle figures, like Homer, tender as Catullus, sententious as a Greek philosopher, the young author of thirty-two peopled the age with his rare creations, and drew their forms upon his immortal sky. Never were such versatility, ease, and grace. The poet had only to sing, and his audience would follow him wherever he led-to the green, cool forest glades, to Fairy-land, to Titania's gay revels, to the historic haunts of Tudors and Plantagenets, to the woods of Dunsinane, the horrors of the fated castle, to the wild coasts of Denmark, the polished halls of Venice and Verona, the Roman Forum, the Syrian palaces, or the haunted islands of the desolate seas. His verse sometimes melted into sweetness unknown to the English tongue before, as in Romeo and Juliet or the Midsummer Night's Dream; sometimes rose to sonorous and epic pomp in his historical plays, or tragic rage and vigor in Macbeth, Hamlet, and Lear.

Shakspeare's Tragic Power.-In every kind of poetry Shakspeare excelled every

one else. In short, love-poems he wrote so delicately, with such wonderful condensation of thought as Martial or Moore could never rival. His verse flows at will into the linked sweetness of a perpetual melody. His fancy rose without labor to tragic conceptions, before which the rude outlines of Marlowe and Jonson seem coarse and idle rant. Tragedy with him never soared above nature; yet all the darkest secrets of human guilt he dragged into open day. When Lady Macbeth stalks over the stage, her staring eyes open, but their senses shut; when Hamlet stabs Polonius through the arras; when Macbeth cried, from the battlements of Dunsinane, "I have almost forgot the taste of fears," or Lear breathed out his horrible imprecations, it was almost impossible to believe that this was the gentle Shakspeare, wit, humorist, gay companion, whose generous breast had never felt the passions he imagined, and whose love sonnets and poems were softer and more musical than those of Spenser.

Shakspeare's Fertility. From 1592, Shakspeare's plays succeeded each other with ceaseless rapidity. His fancy could never have been at rest. His sonnets, odes, poems, tragedies, comedies, form a vast body

of literature that has never lost its popularity. Royster Doyster and Gordubuc, Webster's White Devil, Marston's Sophonisba, Peele's Edward I., even Jonson's Alchemist, and the Sad Shepherd, a Lay of Robin Hood, appear no more; the monstrous or the artificial tragedies and comedies of the day are laid aside forever. It was only Shakspeare who wrote for posterity, and who, in the first period of his active life-from 1592 to 1600-filled England with joyous or soft emotions; or who, saddened perhaps by the fate of his friends Essex and Southampton, touched by the world's ingratitude, wrote the sad melodies of Lear and the bitter misanthropy of Timon. He was only twentyeight when he began his literary career; it closed in boundless success about 1613. Shakspeare was the most fortunate of his contemporaries-happier than Bacon, more prosperous than Spenser and Jonson, because more prudent. Within twenty years he raised the shadowy pyramid of his fame, and founded anew the Anglo-Saxon literature.

Shakspeare's Portrait. And this was done by a rustic from Stratford! The mystery of Shakspeare's life can never be solved, nor is it possible to discover whence he ob

tained his learning, taste, politeness, intense consciousness of right, his Puritanic aspirations, his humanity, his magnanimity. It is sufficient to know that he was formed of gentler and rarer clay than common mortals. Jansen's portrait represents him as a man of delicate and cultivated tastes, with a deep, half-melancholy eye, an air of sweet magnanimity and generous strength. The portrait may not be authentic; the likeness is not unworthy of the poet.

His Home and Childhood.-The Shakspeares* lived at Stratford, in one of the fairest districts of England, amidst smiling fields, broad parks, gay gardens, beside the silvery Avon; and here they had been known for several generations, apparently, as farmers of good repute and in easy circumstances. The poet's father was wealthy for his station, owned several pieces of property, and probably tilled the farm he had received as the inheritance of his wife. A cluster of pleasant villages, in that early day, sur

The name of the poet is spelled in various ways. In this age, says Dr. Elze, persons seldom spelled their names twice alike. Sidney had several spellings; Ben Jonson several. Spenser or Spencer is used indifferently. Some noted names have five, ten, and even twenty different spellings; Shakspeare, fifty-five!

rounded Stratford ;* the lanes were greener, the walks cooler and more sequestered, the river still unsullied, the forest filled with its wild tenants. And when Shakspeare wandered unwillingly to school, he knew, no doubt, every nook in the woodlands, every favorite pool in the neighboring streams, had dreamed of Robin Hood in Lucy Park, and felt the charms of the scenes he left only to return. At Wilmecote, a mile from Stratford, was the farm which had been given to his mother by her father, Robert Arden. On another country road to which Shakspeare was soon to learn the way was Shottery, the village where lived the Hathaways. Shakspeare's father was a person of respectability, at one time chief bailiff of Stratford, the owner of lands and houses, a man highly thought of by his townsmen. He had nine children, of whom William was the eldest. At the Stratford grammar-school the poet was educated at ease, was probably destined to become a farmer and live at Stratford in obscure content. His school

* Ward (Shakspeare), Drake (Shakspeare and his Times), the Shakspeare Society's papers, and endless publications give all that can be told of Shakspeare's youth. It is very little.