Plainly, Shakespeare was a voyager in this world, and a discoverer, sailing all seas and climbing tallest altitudes to their far summits; but flight was not native to him, as if he had said:
"We have not wings, we can not soar;
But we have feet to scale, and climb."
I can not think him spiritual in the gracious sense. His contemporary, Edmund Spenser, was spiritual, as even Milton was not. This world made appeal to this poet of the Avon on the radiant earthly side; the very clouds flamed with a glory borrowed from the sun as he looked on them. His world was very fair. In more than a poetic sense was
"All the world a stage."
Life was a drama, hastening, shouting, exhilarating, turbulent, free, roistering, but as triumphant as Elizabeth's fleet and God's stormy waters were over Philip's great Armada. Hamlet was the terribly tragic conception in Shakespeare because he was hopeless. Can you conceive Shakespeare writing "In Memoriam?" Tennyson was pre-eminently spiritual, and "In Memoriam" is his breath dimming the window-pane on which he breathed. That was Tennyson's life, but was patently no brave part of Shakespeare. He knew to shape tragedy, such as Romeo and Juliet; but how to send abroad a cry like Enoch Arden's prayer lay not in him. He compassed our world, but found no way to leave what proved a waterlogged ship; and how to pilot to
"The undiscovered country, from whose bourne
No traveler returns,"
puzzles Shakespeare's will as it had Hamlet's.
So not even our great Shakespeare can monopolize life. Some landscapes have not lain like a picture beneath his eyes; he did not exhaust poetry nor life, and room is still left for
"New men, strange faces, other minds,"
for whom,