For him Thy sovereign pleasure passed them by;
Sidney’s fair youth, and Raleigh’s ripened age,
Spenser’s chaste soul, and his imperial mind
Who taught and shamed mankind.
“Shakespeare Tercentennial Celebration, 23 April 1864.” Songs of Many Seasons. 1875.
CARDINAL WISEMAN, 1865
(1802-1865)
We may compare the mind of Shakespeare to a diamond, pellucid, bright, and untinted, cut into countless polished facets, which, in constant movement, at every smallest change of direction or of angle, caught a new reflection, so that not one of its brilliant mirrors could be for a moment idle, but by a power beyond its control was ever busy with the reflection of innumerable images, either distinct or running into one another, or repeated each so clearly as to allow him, when he chose, to fix it in his memory.
William Shakespeare. 1865, p. 50.