Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/267

 There is a kindred gift in Robert Browning, which makes its confession thus:—

"If we have souls, know how to see and use, One place performs, like any other place, The proper service every place on earth Was framed to furnish man with; serves alike To give him note that, through the place he sees, A place is signified he never saw, But, if he lack not soul, may learn to know."

The soul of the true artist being cosmopolitan, any place can become the centre of his circumference; for he is already outside of the world which his neighborhood is too little to embrace. Perhaps his neighbors are penurious step-dames who make scanty provision for emotion, and detest passionate experiences of every kind. But his imagination cannot starve. It implies all "the pomp and circumstance of glorious" life, just as the genius of creation involved and anticipated ourselves, who dress for it a perpetual banquet though no man sees it feeding, and none offer it their alms. The artist's soul transmutes the refuse of factories, the sweepings of coal, bone-parings, and street-scraps into the brilliant colors which, like clarions, precede Beauty's procession and summon the spectators.

If Lord Bacon wrote the plays, he must have conceived the female characters which invest them with such dignity and graciousness. To have done that required a comprehension of the varieties of the female disposition, such as could be derived only from personal contact and experience. To have seized some broad features of the plays, Bacon must have been acquainted