They say that such thy selflessness in giving
Selves to thy creatures and rich everydays,
Thy self escapes us, whilst those selves be living—
They say, and saying do intend thy praise.
Not so. Thou Life—most life, begetting life—
So gav'st thy lineaments to king and clown,
Thy pitch of voice, thy bent at love or strife,
Thy tricks of walking, or of sitting down,
That were some guest who knew thy progeny
Met at the Mermaid with thy band and Ben,
He'd know the corner-chair that compassed thee,
And name the Shakespeare of those merry men,
Even had he never seen thy pictured dust—
The folio's graven brass, the Stratford bust.

Or turn it round: what man of wit and worth,
Practised in hearts and heads, if he should meet
Some of thy offspring (known to all the earth)
Unknown, unsired, upon some Noman's street,
Could not contrive the lineage, could not find
In tragic hero with the poet's eye,
In jester with the analytic mind,
Something for sure to name his father by;
In lover, madman, maiden, something there
Of fancy delicate, or passion free
(Not even in thy next of kin, Molière)
Involved in thy inveterate irony,
Proclaiming more than blazon highest hung
The great progenitor from whence they sprung.

Self is the origin and end of art,
'Tis but the symbol varies: each will tell
His goal of mind, his plenitude of heart,
What might befall him, or before befell.
Some speak the naked words, “I love, I hate”;
Some as a lark surmount the setting sun;
Some pour themselves in story or debate;
But lyric, epic, drama, all are one.
And thou art mightier, more manifest
Than all the others, having multiplied
Thyself in thought, in love, in rage, in jest,
In all conditions, more than all beside:
And yet that more of thee is so much more,
We least can measure, where we most adore.

But thy humanity is so much ours,
Such of our little is in thy so-vast,
That love and kinship in essential powers
Give adoration a familiar cast.
There is in Æschylus too much of sky,
Of doom, of thunder, god, and precipice;
Too much of Hell in Dante's awful eye,
Despite its visioning of Beatrice:
But thou, if thou transcend us, still art here;
If prophecy, an earthly prophecy;
A far To-morrow, a To-day how near;
Thy sole self now, but all mankind to-be.
And all the best the world's best artists reach,
We measure by thy stature and thy speech.

Near, but not common. When the times-to-come
Shall breed a race, with eye as quick and wide
To see each shape and hue, and trace it home,
Each motion, whence engendered, how applied;
A race that looks with thy inerrant ken
Each object through, beyond its rags or robes,
And, having worked, will go to work again,
And, having probed the world, forever probes;
A race with memory for all behind,
With hope to all ahead; a race where each
Contains his fellow, mind surrounding mind,
Born to thy incommunicable speech:
Then shalt thou common be, with joys and tears,—
Obscured amid the sanity of peers.

Musing by night on thee, this fancy came:
Suppose the earth were blasted to a rind,
Shent too of waters, winds, and heavenly flame,
It could be clothed and peopled from thy mind:
What hills and woods, and under what a sun!
What streams and seas, and what a fair moon under!
What prodigality of flowers begun,
What winds recruited, what revivèd thunder!
What birds would sing, and to what maiden vows;
What hounds would hunt, and with what hunter's horn;
What thatchèd roofs, what towns, what masted prows;
What merchants, rogues, and kings, and dames, re-born!
An earth so furnished, filled with such an host,
The gods would scarce lament the one they lost.

Indeed, 'twere goodlier to deities
Than earth as now; familiars would they meet
On bosky islands, under moony trees,
Spirits of iris wing and fairy feet;
And, finding entertainment from mankind
Less niggard than when now to earth they come,
Finding more dancers in the May-morn wind,
More singing goodmen at the harvest-home,
More awe at bridal, burial, they would then
Revisit oftener than now the streams
And myriad villages of mortal men,
And oft'ner send their services and dreams.
Nor would they mourn such engin'ry of strife
As now most keeps them rearward of our life.

Three centuries 'tis since Ben, thy comrade, swore
Thou wert not of an age but for all time;
New states have risen, old have gone before;
New knowledge come, and poets with new rhyme.
But thou abidest through all change the same,—
Nay, not the same; such thy mysterious growth,
Thy self increaseth with increasing fame,
And three large centuries are increased by both.
Thy heart and head have been communicated
To millions, who were after blent with thee;
Thy voice, in hundred languages translated,
Takes on a blending with the wind and sea.
Thou are so great that thou wilt not despise
This book we've wrought thee under alien skies.