the critics are busy reading unutterable sadness between the lines; and while we smile at Puck, and the fairies, and the sweet Titania nursing her uncouth love, we must remember that the learned Dr. Ulrici has pronounced the Midsummer Night's Dream to be a serious homily, preached with grave heart to an unthinking world. But is Robin Goodfellow really a missionary in disguise, and are the poets as pessimistic in their teaching as their interpreters would have us understand? Heine undoubtedly was, and Byron pretended to be. Keats, with all the pathos of his shadowed young life, was nothing of the sort, nor was Milton, nor Goethe, nor Wordsworth; while Scott, lost, apparently, to the decent requirements of his art, confessed unblushingly that fortune could not long play a dirge upon his buoyant spirits. And Shakespeare? Why, he was all and everything. Day and night, sunlight and starlight, were embraced in his affluent nature. He laid his hand on the quivering pulses of the world, and, recognizing that life was often in itself both pleasant and good, he yet knew, and knew it without pain, that death was better still. Look only
