Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/131

 alloyed with disappointments and galled ambitions, is yet virile enough to stake its own aggrandizement rather than let inglorious caution strangle the chance of supremacy. The style is elevated and sincere. Rumors of a conflicting nature, making post-horses of the wind, come like cross-tides to dash the feelings to and fro; now lifting them upon a wave of promise, now letting them drop into the trough of despondency. The decisive drift is soon announced, and the father of Hotspur has to accept the tidings of his son's fate. In vain the sanguine-tempered Lord Bardolph discredits and tries to explain away the news. But his spirit rises to the tide-mark of the disaster:

"We all, that are engaged to this loss, Knew that we ventur'd on such dangerous seas, That, if we wrought our life, 'twas ten to one: And yet we ventur'd, for the gain propos'd Chok'd the respect of likely peril fear'd; And, since we are o'erset, venture again. Come; we will all put forth,—body, and goods."

It seems as if these high resolves ought to fill the horizon and extrude every thing irrelevant. But not so: something quite as capacious, but fertilized by not one dot of grandeur, comes vaporing on the scene.

Down to a period quite late in the history of literature, the French were unable to understand how we could accept the confusion of moods in Shakspeare's tragedies, and their abrupt introduction into the nobler sentiment of the scene, as comedy races after gravity to overtake and strangle it, and the gravity quite as unexpectedly recurs. This appeared to their æsthetic crit