is no poet of the soul, using the word "soul" in its larger sense, and not confining it to the spiritual nature of man, but meaning thereby that subtle appreciation of the mysteries of Nature, that feeling of awe, wonder, mystery, and apprehension that all men, even the hardest and most matter of fact, must at some moments of their lives experience that realisation of an inner and mystic communion, between one's own individuality and the universe as a whole, and that participation in, and connection with, all created things. Shakespeare is no delineator of such feelings as these; he is essentially a realist, or a painter of the visible creation. In his sonnets it is true he is an idealist, but it is the idealism of the outer vision, rather than of the inner life.

Of course true poetry has nothing at all to do with verse, or the arrangement and metrical setting of the words. It can be written almost as beautifully in prose. All that metre and verse can do for it is to point its meaning, and attune it to the ear. The beauty of the thought resides in the prose; metre merely lends an additional charm when the metre is apt and appropriate to the thought. In the English tongue, at any rate, the book of Job is written entirely in prose, though it towers above all the poetry in the world.

Shakespeare casts his poetry in three moulds, or forms, the dramatic, the lyrical, and the sonnet, and it is difficult to say in which the result is most beautiful and effective.

His lyrics are delightful and unique of their kind. There is an airy and almost childlike charm about them which is perfectly bewitching. They are at times fragmentary and broken, and call to mind a spent dandelion flower floating with its seeds hither and thither in the summer air, and with the sunbeams playing upon and around it.

The dramatic form of course is more formal, but well suited for theatrical and rhetorical declamation, and is usually expressed in blank verse, a sort of cross between prose and poetry, or poetry that does not rhyme.

Shakespeare was not the originator, as Dryden asserts, of this method of expression, though one of the first to adopt it; the distinction of originating it belongs to Marlowe, one of the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors.

It is a method of expression well adapted to certain sorts of dramatic writing. While it relieves the ear of the monotonous jingle of perpetual rhyme, it at the same time lends spirit and condensation to the otherwise unrestrained liberty of pure prose, and tends to put a check on undue license and verbosity.

Shakespeare, then, is the poet of Nature, and the poet of human action and passion in its most virile and realistic moods.

He is not primarily or essentially the poet of Love. Indeed "love" in almost all his great historical plays is conspicuous by its absence, or only plays a very subordinate part. Love, between the sexes, is in them almost ignored, and what there is in them of love and marriage is for the most part courtly and formal, and a matter of convenance. It is the match - making of kings and queens, of lords and ladies, due rather to political and social necessity, than to the promptings of the heart.

Again in most of the great tragedies, such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Cæsar, and the like, there is little of love to be discovered.

Venus and Adonis and Lucrece are not properly love poems at all, but wonderful and very vivid portrayals of the power of lust over the nature of

man.

No one has contrasted the nature of the two with more felicity and power than Shakespeare himself.

"Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled,

Since sweating Lust on earth usurp'd his name:
Under whose simple semblance he hath fed
Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame;
Which the hot tyrant stains, and soon bereaves,
As caterpillars do the tender leaves.

"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,

But Lust's effect is tempest after sun ;

Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies:
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies."

And no man can depict with greater beauty and truth, love, in its higher manifestations.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds

Or bends with the remover to remove :

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken ;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickles compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me proved

I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd."

But Shakespeare can draw, and has drawn, many beautiful love scenes and interviews, with as deft, delicate, and perfect a pen as any poet of them all.

There are lovers of every variety, differing in age, appearance, character, and disposition, Benedick and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Desdemona, Orlando and Rosalind, Leonatus and Imogen, and a host of others; all different types, and all conducting themselves under the influence of this passion, agreeably to their natures and surroundings.

Perhaps the climax of beauty in the description of adolescent love is reached in the balcony scene between Romeo and Juliet. But Shakespeare in this last play has made, to English ears at any rate, a rather unaccountable error. He fixes the age of Juliet at fourteen years, or under. Now no man, or no youth, unless

his nature were abnormal or diseased, would have committed suicide for a girl of such tender years. It is not quite true to Nature, but of course it is immaterial, as one can imagine Juliet at any age one pleases.

But Love, sexual or otherwise, does not, and cannot from the very nature of the case, occupy the whole life of man, and Shakespeare's brain was far too active, virile, and varied, to let it come entirely under the dominion of that, or of any other passion or emotion.

As Dr Johnson, when discussing Shakespeare in his "Lives of the Poets," very justly observes:

"Upon every other stage the universal agent is Love, by whose power all good and evil is distributed, and every action quickened or retarded. To bring a lover a lady, and a rival into the fable; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with opposition of interest, and harass them with violence of desires with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow; to distress them as nothing human ever was distressed; to deliver them as nothing human ever was delivered; is the business of modern dramatists. For this, probability is violated, life misrepresented, and language is depraved. But love is only one of many passions; and as it has no great influence on the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him. He knew that any other passion as it was,

regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity."

Nor does Shakespeare in his study and portrayal of Nature confine himself to the great outlines, sweeps, and effects, so dear to the mind of the poet. When detail is necessary for the perfection of his art, and when purpose and inspiration prompt him, he can, as far as visual observation will carry him, analyse any object, whether animate or inanimate, with close and accurate detail and discernment. What more perfect picture of the stallion was ever drawn than that in Venus and Adonis? Its movements, its quality, its high breeding, nay, even its anatomy, are all noted and delineated with an unerring pen.

Or again, turn to the description of the bee and its habits, to be found in Henry V.:

"Obedience; for so work the honey bees,
Creatures that, by a rule in nature, teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
To have a king, and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;

Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;

Who, busied in his majesty, surveys

The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-ey'd justice with his surly hum,
Deliv'ring o'er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.'

The above description has been demurred to by some critics on the grounds of its biological inaccuracy, one notable one going so far as to declare that there is a mistake in every other line.

From the point of view of natural history, there very probably is. But Shakespeare was no naturalist;

B