Now let us turn to _Lear_. We find in him an old man with a large
heart, hungry for love, and yet not knowing what love is; an old man as
ignorant as a child in all matters of high import; with a temper so
unsubdued, and therefore so unkingly, that he storms because his dinner
is not ready by the clock of his hunger; a child, in short, in
everything but his grey hairs and wrinkled face, but his failing,
instead of growing, strength. If a life end so, let the success of that
life be otherwise what it may, it is a wretched and unworthy end. But
let _Lear_ be blown by the winds and beaten by the rains of heaven, till
he pities "poor naked wretches;" till he feels that he has "ta'en too
little care of" such; till pomp no longer conceals from him what "a
poor, bare, forked animal" he is; and the old king has risen higher in
the real social scale--the scale of that country to which he is
bound--far higher than he stood while he still held his kingdom
undivided to his thankless daughters. Then let him learn at last that
"love is the only good in the world;" let him find his _Cordelia_, and
plot with her how they will in their dungeon _singing like birds i' the
cage_, and, dwelling in the secret place of peace, look abroad on the
world like _God's spies_; and then let the generous great old heart
swell till it breaks at last--not with rage and hate and vengeance, but
with love; and all is well: it is time the man should go to overtake his
daughter; henceforth to dwell with her in the home of the true, the
eternal, the unchangeable.
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