Page:Shakspeare and His Times (1852).djvu/34

 rical performance, elevating, in poetic transport, the animal about to fall beneath his ax to the dignity of a victim, or perhaps even to that of a tyrant?

In the year 1576, the brilliant Leicester celebrated the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Kenilworth by festivities, whose extraordinary magnificence is attested by all the chronicles of the time. Shakspeare was then twelve years old, and Kenilworth is only a few miles from Stratford. It is difficult to doubt that the family of the young poet participated, with all the population of the surrounding country, in the pleasure and admiration excited by these pompous spectacles. What an impulse would the imagination of Shakspeare not fail to receive! Nevertheless, the early years of the poet have transmitted to us, as the only sign of those singularities which may announce the presence of genius, the anecdote which I have just related; and the information which we possess regarding the amusements of his youth gives no hint whatever of the tastes and pleasures of a literary life.

We live in times of civilization and progress, when every thing has its place and rule, and when the destiny of every individual is determined by circumstances more or less imperious, but which manifest themselves at an early period. A poet begins by being a poet; he who is to become one knows it almost from infancy; poetry has been familiar to his earliest contemplation; it may have been his first taste, his first passion when the movement of the passions awakened in his heart. The young man has expressed in verse that which he does not yet feel; and when feeling truly arises within him, his first thought will be to express it in verse. Poetry has become the object of his existence—an object as important as any other—a career in which he may obtain fortune as well as