And these Shakespearian women, though all radiations from one great ideal of womanhood, are at the same time intensely individualized. Each has a separate soul, and the processes of intellect as well as emotion are different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with the faculty, and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagination; but who could mistake the imagination of Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen?—the loitering, lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating whatever it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency, the flash and the bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps the most completely expressed of Shakespeare's women; for in her every faculty and affection is fused with imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is combined with vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind darts in an instant to the ultimate of everything. After she has parted with her husband, she does not merely say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged, and in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up, she goes up; she would have charged him, she says,
"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
T'encounter me with orisons, for then
I am in heaven for him."
When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possible object of his sensual whim is at once consumed in the fire that leaps from her impassioned lips,—
"Some jay of Italy,
Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him."
Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive action of Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "smothers her with painting." Now Imogen's wrath first reduces the light woman to the most contemptible of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, annihilates her very being with the swift thought that the paint on her cheeks is her mother,—that she is nothing but the mere creation of painting, a phantom born of a color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to show that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women are as individual as their dispositions.
And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul! Within the immense space which stretches between Dogberry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or Cordelia, lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever exhibited such philosophic comprehensiveness, but philosophic comprehensiveness is often displayed apart from creative comprehensiveness, and along the whole vast line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations that Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were vital, his insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in forms. And now was he proud of his transcendent superiorities? Did he think that he had exhausted all that can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of the soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undiscovered and undiscerned regions of existence was never felt with more reverent humility than by this discoverer, who had seen in rapturous vision so many new worlds open on his view. In the play which perhaps best indicates the ecstatic action of his mind, and which is alive in every part with that fiery sense of unlimited power which the mood of ecstasy gives,—in the play of "Antony and Cleopatra," he has put into the mouth of the Soothsayer what seems to have been his own modest judgment of the extent of his glance into the universe of matter and mind:—
"In Nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read!"
LONGFELLOW'S TRANSLATION OF DANTE'S DIVINA COMMEDIA.
In the North American Review for March, 1809, we read of Cary's Dante: "This we can pronounce, with confidence, to be the most literal translation in poetry in our language."