It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the platform at Elsinore, beginning,
To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.
And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer, and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare’s temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan’s bedroom door, dagger in hand, to say,
Now o’er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.
And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he steals from Hamlet’s mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:—
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
That this is one of Shakespeare’s most striking characteristics will not be denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will
any such student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical dreamer.
Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it on the lyrical side? Shakespeare’s fine lyrics are so few that they would be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson’s lyrical work. On one side only of Shakespeare’s genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more closely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so near Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:—
And more, my son! for more than once when I
Sat all alone, revolving in myself
The word that is the symbol of myself,
The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
Were strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self.
The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.