of character, ascribes the power and modesty of habitual devotion to the gentle and the just.  The death-bed of Katharine is bright with visions of angels; and the great soldier-king, standing by his few dead, acknowledges the presence of the hand that can save alike by many or by few.  But observe that from those who with deepest spirit meditate, and with deepest passion mourn, there are no such words as these; nor in their hearts are any such consolations.  Instead of the perpetual sense of the helpful presence of the Deity, which, through all heathen tradition, is the source of heroic strength, in battle, in exile, and in the valley of the shadow of death, we find only in the great Christian poet the consciousness of a moral law, through which ’the gods are just, and of our pleasant vices make instruments to scourge us;’ and of the resolved arbitration of the destinies, that conclude into precision of doom what we feebly and blindly began; and force us, when our indiscretion serves us, and our deepest plots do pall, to the confession that ’there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.’"[2]

[Footnote 1:  3rd edition, sec. 115.]

[Footnote 2:  Mr. Ruskin has analyzed “The Tempest,” in “Munera Pulveris,” sec. 124, et seqq., but from another point of view.]

128.  Now, it is perfectly clear that this criticism was written with two or three plays, all belonging to one period, very conspicuously before the mind.  Of the illustrative exceptions that are made to the general rule, one is derived from a play which Shakspere wrote at a very early date, and the other from a scene which he almost certainly never wrote at all; the whole of the rest of the passage quoted is founded upon “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” “Othello,” and “Lear”—­that is, upon the earlier productions of what we must call Shakspere’s sceptical period.  But these plays represent an essentially transient state of thought.  Shakspere was to learn and to teach that those who most deeply meditate and most passionately mourn are not the men of noblest or most influential character—­that such may command our sympathy, but hardly our respect or admiration.  Still less did Shakspere finally assert, although for a time he believed, that a blind destiny concludes into precision what we feebly and blindly begin.  Far otherwise and nobler was his conception of man and his mission, and the unseen powers and their influences, in the third and final stage of his thought.

129.  Had Shakspere lived longer, he would doubtless have left us a series of plays filled with the bright and reassuring tenderness and confidence of this third period, as long and as brilliant in execution as those of the second period.  But as it is we are in possession of quite enough material to enable us to form accurate conclusions upon the state of his final thought.  It is upon “The Tempest” that we must in the main rely for an exposition of this; for though the other plays and fragments fully exhibit the restoration