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 its functions and degrees as the angelic hierarchy of the Areopagite,
where his contemplative eye could crowd itself with various and
brilliant pictures, and whence his impartial brain--one lobe of which
seems to have been Normanly refined and the other Saxonly
sagacious--could draw its morals of courtly and worldly wisdom, its
lessons of prudence and magnanimity. In estimating Shakspeare, it should
never be forgotten, that, like Goethe, he was essentially observer and
artist, and incapable of partisanship. The passions, actions,
sentiments, whose character and results he delighted to watch and to
reproduce, are those of man in society as it existed; and it no more
occurred to him to question the right of that society to exist than to
criticize the divine ordination of the seasons. His business was with
men as they were, not with man as he ought to be,--with the human soul
as it is shaped or twisted into character by the complex experience of
life, not in its abstract essence, as something to be saved or lost.
During the first half of the seventeenth century, the centre of
intellectual interest was rather in the other world than in this, rather
in the region of thought and principle and conscience than in actual
life. It was a generation in which the poet was, and felt himself, out
of place. Sir Thomas Browne, our most imaginative mind since Shakspeare,
found breathing-room, for a time, among the "_O altitudines!_" of
religious speculation, but soon descended to occupy himself with the
exactitudes of science. Jeremy Taylor, who half a century earlier would
have been Fletcher's rival, compels his clipped fancy to the
conventional discipline of prose, (Maid Marian turned nun,) and waters
his poetic wine with doctrinal eloquence. Milton is saved from making
total shipwreck of his large-utteranced genius on the desolate Noman's
Land of a religious epic only b