"Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man:
I loved thee, spirit, and love; nor can
The soul of Shakspeare love thee more."
So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems--"In
Memoriam"--addressing the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of
his song arises the thought of _the Poet_ of all time, who loved his
friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had
not his love been too strong even for that death, alone ghastly, which
threatened to cut the golden chain that bound them, and part them by the
gulf impassable. Tennyson's friend had never wronged him; and to the
divineness of Shakspere's love is added that of forgiveness. Such love
as this between man and man is rare, and therefore to the mind which is
in itself no way rare, incredible, because unintelligible. But though
all the commonest things are very divine, yet divine individuality is
and will be a rare thing at any given period on the earth. Faith, in its
ideal sense, will always be hard to find on the earth. But perhaps this
kind of affection between man and man may, as Coleridge indicates in his
"Table Talk," have been more common in the reigns of Elizabeth and James
than it is now.
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