To our imagination the surmise is that Shakespeare here laid down his pen, and began to pace his chamber, too agitated to write more that night.

In this extreme familiarity with the conception of mortality in general, and perhaps also in this extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as a matter of personal import, all great poets, and possibly all great men whatever, have to some extent resembled Shakespeare. For these are the feelings of our common nature on which religion and all solemn activity have founded and maintained themselves. Space and Time are the largest and the outermost of all human conceptions; to stand, therefore, incessantly upon these extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a figure, and to view all inwards from them, is the highest exercise of thought to which a human being can attain. Accordingly, in all great poets there may be discerned this familiarity of the imagination with the world figured as a poor little ball pendent in space and moving forward out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. But in this respect Shakespeare exceeds them all; and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more religious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical, than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakespeare. Thus:—

“And our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”—Tempest.

Here the poetic imagination sweeps boldly round the universe, severing it as by a soft cloud-line from the infinite Unknown.

“Poor soul! the centre of my sinful earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that lead thee ’stray!”
Sonnet 146.

Here the soul, retracting its thoughts from the far and physical, dwells disgustedly on itself.

“The dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns.”—Hamlet.

Here the soul, pierced with the new and awful thought of sin, wings out again towards the Infinite, and finds all dark.

“How would you be,
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are?”—Measure for Measure.

Here the silver lamp of hope is hung up within the gloomy sphere, to burn softly and faintly for ever!