1 5$ Shakspeare 



The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, 

 The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 

 Yea, all that it inherit, shall melt away, and 

 Like this unsubstantial pageant faded, 

 Leave not a wrack behind. 

 This pensive reflection in his last and leave- 

 taking play, where in person of Prospero he 

 finally abjured his magic and broke his staff, was 

 a kind of musing on the universal flux and transi- 

 toriness of things which was often in his mind, 

 as several passages in the Sonnets show. In the 

 play of Henry IV. (Act iii., Scene i.) the sore-tried 

 and weary-laden king, ruminating sadly that if 

 one could read the book of fate and see the 

 revolutions of things — valleys raised and moun- 

 tains levelled, continents pushed into seas and seas 

 swallowing up continents, all the manifold changes 

 and chances and passings-away of the world — 

 exclaims 



O, if this were seen 

 The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, 

 What perils past, what crosses to ensue, 

 "Would shut the book and sit him down and die.* 



If these were not Shakspeare's opinions, as it 

 will no doubt be said, but reflections put fitly into 

 the mouths of his characters, at all events they 



* In the Rape of Lucrece his thoughts expand in detailed 

 exposition of the destructive work of time which ruins proud 

 buildings, tarnishes their golden towers, fills stately monuments 

 with worm-holes, spoils antiquities of hammered steel, wastes 

 huge stones with water-drops, dries the oak*s sap, feeds oblivion 

 with decay of things. 



