Page:Appreciations of Horace Howard Furness.djvu/37

 Rh Bridge); and that the poet's essentially dramatic spirit gave to his own sonnets a dramatic form. They seem spoken by one human being to another, spoken in accents of grief, of doubt, of ecstasy, of despair; but in this manner do all Shakespeare's characters speak. This is the impelling force of the dramatic spirit, peopling earth and sky; not the impelling force of the personal spirit, seeking to take the world into its confidence. Shakespeare may even be permitted to bewail his outcast state, without our beginning straightway to sniff a peccadillo.

That the dramatic spirit which baffles scrutiny should have made a powerful appeal to Dr. Furness was right and reasonable. It was the appeal of consanguinity. Like all his race, he had the actor's gifts: not only spirit and fire in declamation, not only the flexible voice and the appropriate gesture; but the power to lose himself past finding in every character he portrayed. Those who have heard him read, know what I mean. The clarion call of Henry the Fifth before the gates of Harfleur, his prayer upon the field of Agincourt,—these things were not mere elocution, however noble and effective; they were passionate appeals to man and God, breaking from the lips of one whose head was reeling with the joy of battle, whose heart was heavy with the awful burden of authority. It was as a boy of fourteen that Dr. Furness first heard Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Peirce Butler) read Shakespeare's