Shadows fall on brightest hours. Procter.
Shadows to-night / Have struck more terror 5 to the soul of Richard / Than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers. Rich. III., v. 3.
Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, / And look on death itself. Macb., ii. 3.
Shakespeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity as to suggest a wealth that beggars his own; and we then feel that the splendid works which he has created, and which in other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, have no stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing traveller on the rock. Emerson.
Shakespeare does not look at a thing merely, but into it, through it, so that he constructively comprehends it, can take it asunder and put it together again; the thing melts, as it were, into light under his eye, and anew creates itself before him. Carlyle.
Shakespeare is dangerous to young poets; they cannot but reproduce him, while they imagine they are producing themselves. Goethe.
Shakespeare is no sectarian; to all he deals 10 with equity and mercy; because he knows all, and his heart is wide enough for all. In his mind the world is a whole; he figures it as Providence governs it; and to him it is not strange that the sun should be caused to shine on the evil and the good, and the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. Carlyle.
Shakespeare is the greatest intellect who, in our recorded world, has left record of himself in the way of literature. I know not such power of vision, such faculty of thought in any other man, such calmness of depth; placid joyous strength; all things imaged in that great soul of his so true and clear, as in a tranquil unfathomable sea. A perfectly level mirror, that is to say withal, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man. Carlyle.
Shakespeare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest. Emerson.
Shakespeare must have seemed a dull man at times, he was so flashingly brilliant at others. Bovee.