230 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of beauty, beauty be bereft. There is no more marvelous picture in 

 all the vegetal world than that of a great tree with all its myriad 

 cells, in summer so filled with the rush of life's activity and change 

 that we might hear its music, in autumn sinking to quiescence, and 

 the winter's silent chill where liquid prisoners sleep 'neath walls of 

 glass. The poet did not understand it; he simply prophesied better 

 than he knew. He makes us think of Goethe, of Lucretius. These 

 men made happy guesses. Lucretius especially surprises us by his 

 views of the constitution of matter — unverified, so far as we can 

 know. Goethe lived in the age of science and went on laboriously to 

 verify his surmises. The only natural science which Shakespeare 

 knew was gardening — if that may be called a science. His Sonnets 

 are supposed to have been written about 1590, and the first scien- 

 tific glimpse of the " prisoner pent in walls of glass " came about 

 1670, through the lenses of Nehemiah Grew, a Puritan physicist 

 and botanist. 



I am aware that it is said by some that in a critique like this 

 we are apt to read much into the writings of our author. The quo- 

 tations I have submitted show, it seems to me, that tliis is unneces- 

 sary in the present case at least. The words are generally un- 

 equivocal Of course, the language is poetical, metaphoric, but 

 the metaphor has reference to something else; the description is not 

 the metaphor. But, in fact, ought we to expect in Shakespeare very 

 exact or complete description? His whole art lies in the power of 

 suggestion. The deep impressions a man of genius makes upon our 

 minds lie often, if not always, in what he does not say. A word 

 or two and the vision rises, whether in Nature or in life, a passion 

 or a landscape. Take the broken phrases of Ophelia depicting her 

 broken heart, her " no more but so " ; or the picture of the winter 

 woods in Sonnet LXXIII: 



" That time of year thou mayst in me behold 

 When yellow leaves or none or few do hang 

 Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, 

 Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang." 



Does any one pretend that we are reading into the lines when we 

 appreciate the marvelous sorrow of the one picture or the exquisite 

 truthfulness and splendor of the other? 



Shakespeare's natural eye was clear indeed, but none the less 

 he seems to have seen everything with the eye of his mind. Fara- 

 day so saw the world of force, Newton of mathematical law, and 

 Tyndall's scientific use of the imagination lies in the same direction. 



And so the man of science and the poet have much in common. 

 Both use the natural world, and the imagination is for each an in- 

 strument of effort. The poet's generalization is a splendid vision 



