construction lacks compactness, the meditation is not profound. But there is here, as in the "first heir of his invention," Venus and Adonis, that wide and active thoughtfulness which is the characteristic of first-class minds, and, as concomitant of this, continuity, at once sprightly and logical, of the mental current, where, through the generative impulse given by poetic imagination, thought breeds thought in a fervid flow. In this distinctive attribute of large genius, the endless revivication of the mind by its own activity, Shakespeare is unequaled. We have here, too, his humorous, combined with his moral, view of life. In both plays there are sound and wise sayings, but not yet the wisest, and over and about both, emanating from the genial soul of the young poet, glistens an indescribable poetic atmosphere. Reading them we feel ourselves, as when we walk out in early spring, breathed upon by the virgin breath of unfurling leaves and peeping buds impatient for deeper drafts of solar warmth to shower about them their beauty of color and perfume, with here and there a privileged half-blown rose, that, through inward warmth, has burst prematurely forth on a bush of buds, proclaiming the near future splendors.

IN Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare leapt from spring into summer. Among his works this glowing drama has the place of a fervent noon in May, tremulous with the heat of July, while still laden with vernal fragrance. In human growth indefinable is the line between ripeness and unripeness. A nature so deep, abundant, aspiring, as that of Shakespeare, is ever ripening. But as man, and still more pointedly as artist, Shakespeare had his period of crudeness. By good critical investigators he is believed to have been several years at work on Romeo and Juliet, from 1592 to 1594 or 1595, that is, from his twenty-eighth to his thirty-first year. As a bridge between his young manhood and his middle manhood it would be built carefully and slowly. Yet, in its final state, as we have it now in print, and as representative of the opening of the riper period, it stands in such contrast to others of

his plays, presumed to have preceded it in date, that we call it a leap from comparatively shallow streams into dramatic and poetic deeps.

"When I was in love I wrote love-poems," says Goethe; and so he wrote a great many, through a long series of years. To some of the good people who condemn Goethe for being so often in love, this were a pertinent question: "Dont you wish that you could be?" The man who wrote Romeo and Juliet had a large capability of love. It is the most impassioned drama Shakespeare ever wrote, and the passion which gives it such fiery life being the most powerful in human nature, it draws old and young, warm and even cold, into the whirlpool of its charm; — aye, but it does so through the might of poetry, for none but a great poet, the greatest of poets, could present becomingly, attractively, faithfully, the masterpassion in its beautiful but terrific excess. Here, for the first time in drama (if we are not mistaken in dates), Shakespeare stood forth fully arrayed in the poetic splendors of his great calling. Juliet is first made visible to us by one of its liveliest flashes: when Romeo first beholds her, to him

"She seems to hang upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear."

It is in keeping that poetry should be made to sparkle its brightest at the introduction of her round whom it has thrown so vivid a lustre that in the imagination of men she will shine a magnetic light forever. With tenderest familiarity Shakespeare so nestles himself in the heart of the glowing girl that he can give voice to her most sacred feelings. It is as if, a delicate spirit, he had the privilege of riding on the quickened arteries of her richest blood, those currents that carry from her heart to her cheek her sweetest desires and blushes. The multiplicity and sureness of his intuitions give to Shakespeare his unique supremacy.

Here, too, we have compact characterization, - in the intellectual, refined, high-minded Mercutio, in the truculent Tybalt, in the benevolent, indulgent, wise friar Laurence, in the carnal-minded, garrulous, spoilt old nurse, besides Romeo himself, of whom, being very young, we can only confidently say that there is in him the making of a noble, efficient man, as we cannot but exclaim of Juliet, with such a will and such capacity what a splendid woman she would have become.

Romeo and Juliet is the tragedy of love only because it is the drama of hate. But for the senseless, wicked animosity between the Capulets and Montagues, the love of these two innocents would not have been steeped in blood and death. Had Romeo been a bidden, a welcome guest at Capulet's ball, the mutual love at first sight would have enwrapt him and Juliet all the same in its peremptory folds. Instead of there being a secret, sudden marriage the secrecy and the isolation of the lovers intensifying unhealthily their passion

- they would have had a numerous, happy wedding, to the joy of both families. The feud between the two houses was the remote as well as immediate cause of the sudden, tragic end of the promising, impassioned pair.

While in Romeo and Juliet love is swallowed up in tragedy, in Midsummer Night's Dream love is bantered and flouted by comedy. The whole piece, after we have read it, and while reading it, makes the impression of a remembered, disjointed dream, in which reality is mocked. The play is a humorous. mask gotten up, by the master of the revels for the marriage festival of Theseus and Hyppolita. To give himself the fullest freedom,