Shakspere, Personal Recollections | Page 5

than those
who sought the golden "fleece" among the enchanting waters of Ionian
isles.
Shakspere conjured the characters of his plays from elemental
principles, measures not men, breathing and acting in his divine
atmosphere. It is strange and marvelous that he never wrote a line about
the great men that lived and wrote in his day and age, although
Cervantes, Rubens, Camoens, Bruno, Drake, Raleigh, Calderon,
Corneille, Rembrandt, Kepler, Galileo, Montaigne, Beaumont and
Fletcher, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Ben Jonson were
contemporaneous authors, poets, dramatists, navigators, soldiers,
astronomers and philosophers.
Licentious phrases and actions were universal in Shakspere's time, and
from the corrupt courts of King Henry the Eighth, Elizabeth and King
James, to the cot of the peasant and trail of the tavern, morality hid her
modest head and only flourished among the puritans and philosophers
who kept alive the flame of love and liberty.
Dryden, Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe and Jonson infected literature with
a species of eloquent vulgarity, and Shakspere, willing to please,
readily infused into his various plays sensuous phrases to catch the
rabble cheers and purpled applause. While he worshiped nature, he
never failed to bend the knee for ready cash, and often paid fulsome
tribute to lords and ladies, who flattered his vanity and ministered to his
"itching palm."
Physical passion, mental license and social tyranny ruled in home,
church and state, where Rome and Reformation struggled viciously for
the mastery.

There are nuggets of golden thought still scattered through the plays of
Shakspere that no author or actor has ever discovered, and although
they have read and repeated his lines, for more than three hundred years,
there has been no brain able and brilliant enough to delve into or
explain the secret caves of Shaksperian wit. Human sparrows cannot
know the eagle flights of divine philosophy.
The golden gilt of imagination decorated his phrases and the lambent
light of his philosophy shone like the rosy dawn upon a field of
variegated wild flowers. The hut and the cottage were transformed into
lordly castles while the rocks and the hills became ranges of mountain,
whose icy pinnacles reflected back the shimmering light of suns and
stars.
Shakspere was a man of universal moods and like a chameleon took
color and force from every object he touched. The draughts he took
from the deep flowing wells of nature made no diminution in the
volume of his thought, that rushed through his seething brain like an
underground cataract filled from eternal springs.
Fresh from the mint of his mind fell the clinking, golden coin of
universal value, bearing the glowing stamp of his genius, unrivaled in
the annals of time. Since he wrote and acted, no man ever understood
the depths of his wit and logic, or the height of his imagination and
philosophy. The human mackerel cannot know the human whale.
Shallow, presumptive college bookworms, arrogant librarians and
classical compilers, have attempted to explain his plays and sonnets, in
footnotes, but they have only been entangled in the briers and flowers
of his fancy, finding themselves suffocated at last, in the luxurious
fields of his eloquent rhetoric and universal wisdom.
School-teachers, professors, priests, preachers, popes, and princes are
brushed aside by the cutting phrases of Shakspere and go down to earth
like grass before the scythe of this rustic reaper. They are dumfounded
by his matchless mysterious logic. Religion, law and medicine are
pitchforked about by the Divine William on the threshing floor of his
literary granary, where he separates wheat from chaff, instanter, leaving

the beholder mystified by the splendid result.
Viewing the great minds of the world from Homer to Humboldt,
Shakspere never had an equal or superior, standing on the pinnacle of
the pyramid of human renown, and lifting his mammoth mental form
above the other philosophers of the earth as Mount St. Elias soars
above its brother peaks.
Distance lends a wizard enchantment to his lofty form and down the
rolling ages his glory will grow greater until the whole universe is
luminous with the dazzling lights of his eternal fame.
Such god-like men shall never die; They shine as suns in tropic sky,
And thrill the world with truth and love Derived from nature far above.
Shakspere's mind was pinioned with celestial imagination, and his
rushing flight circled the shores of omnipotence. He taught us that
ignorance was a crime, a murky night without a single star to light the
traveler on his weary way.
Those who have attempted to fathom the depths of the Shaksperian
ocean of thought, have only rounded the rim or skimmed over the
surface of its illimitable magnificence. Tossed about by the billows of
Shakspere's brain, for three hundred and forty years mankind like a ship
in a storm, still wonders and runs on the reefs of his