THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
why great intellect and great poetic faculty—the ability to reason and the ability to see and feel and speak—should not meet in the same person. They did so meet in Sophocles and in Euripides. But it seems that they did not so meet in Shakspere, and perhaps it is only a wilful praise of the poet of our own tongue that would call him, on the whole, the equal of the Greek dramatists.
If we make an intelligent distinction, however, between logical or analytical power and the poetic gift, then this theory of Shakspere's naïve mind is not without hope for a richer conception of the nature of poetry. Shakspere's critics have measured themselves in their measure of him. Milton, who prayed that his own lips might be touched with fire from off the sacred altar, beheld in the dramatist a secular, somewhat secondary, prophet of the same ineffable
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