And the dews of night arise;
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in disguise.
For to grow old and look back on one's childhood, though in much it is a happy thing, may be also a thing full of dread and regret. The old poets never wearied of bidding youth gather its roses, seize its fleeting moments. But not all roses are fresh and fragrant in the keeping, and "lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
[440]. "Afterwards."
Every fine poem says much in little. It packs into the fewest possible words—by means of their sound, their sense, and their companionship—a wide or rare experience. So, in particular, with such a poem as this. It tells of a man thinking of the day when he shall have bidden goodbye to a world whose every live and lovely thing—Spring, hawk, evening, wintry skies—he has dearly loved. And if what it tells of is to be seen as clearly and truly as if it were before one's very eyes, it must be read intently—all one's imagination alert to gather up the full virtue of the words, and to picture in the mind each fleeting and living object in turn.
As I write these lines I cannot refrain from suggesting how thankful we should be to be living in a day when three great poets, who have been long in the world, are adding to the riches of English poetry—Thomas Hardy, Charles Doughty, and the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges. It is but a little while, too, since the death of that exquisite writer, and lover of all things true and beautiful, Alice Meynell, and of W. H. Hudson, who was no less a poet because he wrote not in verse but in prose.
To compare the great things of one age with the great things of another is an exceedingly difficult task (and to pit poet against poet, or imagination against imagination, an exceedingly stupid one). But that in Elizabeth's day England was indeed a "nest of singing birds" may be realised by the fact that when Shakespeare was finishing his last play, The Tempest, in the Spring, apparently, of 1611—when, that is, he himself was aged 47 (and his Queen had been eight years dead), Sir Walter Raleigh was 59, Anthony Munday 58, Samuel Daniel 49, Michael Drayton 48, Thomas Campion 44, Thomas Dekker (?) 41, John Donne and Ben Jonson were 38, John Fletcher was 32, Francis Beaumont 27, William Drummond 26, John Ford 25, William Browne and Robert Herrick 20, Francis Quarles 19, George Herbert 18, Thomas Carew (?) 16, James Shirley 15, and John Milton (and Sir John Suckling) were 2. It was seven years before the birth of Richard Lovelace and Abraham Cowley, ten before Marvell's, and eleven before Vaughan's. Edmund Spenser had been twelve years dead, Sir Philip Sidney twenty-five—and Chaucer 211.
Two hundred and fifty years afterwards—in 1861—another great queen was on the Throne, Victoria. It was the year in which the Prince Consort died, and Edward, Prince of Wales, came of age. Nor was England's garden silent then: for in that year William Barnes and Cardinal Newman were 60, Edward Fitzgerald and Tennyson were 52, Robert Browning 49, Charles Kingsley 42, Matthew Arnold 39, Coventry Patmore 38, William Allingham 37, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith were 33, Christina Rossetti was 31, William Morris 27, Algernon Swinburne 24, Mr. Thomas Hardy was 21, Mr. Robert Bridges 17, Robert Louis Stevenson 11, and Francis Thompson was 2. Other great writers, in English, then alive were Carlyle, Thackeray, Dickens, Ruskin, Darwin and Huxley; Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Walt Whitman. So the strange flame of genius fitfully burns in this world. And 1611 knew as little of 1861 as 1861 knew of 2111. (But would that 1923 could leave to the future one-tenth part of such a legacy as did 1611—the English Bible!)
But to return to Shakespeare. He was born in April 1564. About 1591 he wrote the first of his plays, Love's Labour's Lost. By 1611 he had finished the last of them; 34 in all as they appear in the first Folio, 37 as they now appear in the Canon. And apart from these, his Poems. There followed a strange silence. On the 25th of March, 1616, "in perfect health and memory (God be praised!)," he made his will. On St. George's Day, 1616, he died. To reflect for a moment on that brief lifetime, on that twenty years' work which is now a perennial fountain of happiness, light and wisdom to the whole world, is to marvel indeed. The life-giving secret of this supreme genius none can tell. We know not even our own. But there is a story told by Thomas Campbell: "It was predicted of a young man lately belonging to one of our universities, that he would certainly become a prodigy because he read sixteen hours a day. 'Ah, but,' said somebody, 'how many hours a day does he think?' It might have been added, 'How many hours does he feel?'" So of Shakespeare. As, then, said his old friends and fellow-players, John Heminge and Henry Condell in their Preface to the Folio: "Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger...."