Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/81

 Shakspeare may be everywhere extensively owned without being mentally possessed. We need a Shakspearian piety. Formerly the Bible and a copy of Josephus or some protracted commentary stood within reach of the household, and the leaves were turned by Religion herself who found her own meaning in every text and the meaning inexhaustible. If the volume of Shakspeare could attract a sympathy so loyal and grave as that, Religion would find in him, too, her counterpart. But we do not read Shakspeare yet in spiritual faith, as Bibles are pondered for their consecrated sense. Literature swarms with books of criticism which exhaust invention for theories of his life, profession, and intent; and the various editions of his works are liberally patronized. But where are the devotees whose morning orison is the wonderful liturgy of his imagination, with responses that are intoned by human nature itself, the acknowledgment that mind and heart are surprised by their own detection, yet with as little fear and as much confidence as we repay to omniscience? This is rare, this persistent recurrence of the soul to his enlightening, this praying before the shrine of every verse in which a thought, a passion, a humor, a delight, a beauty, is the saint. Must we have, then, professorships of Shakspeare to instruct the youth and inculcate this natural piety? Rather let every household accuse its own indifference, and endow its hearts to make him more widely felt and understood. For there are sweetness and light, wisdom and conscience and self-knowledge slumbering unmined below those covers.