There are others who pass through life enwrapped by the veil of a noble sorrow; and, when I see them, I am minded to wonder whether any one was ever the worse for encountering the touch of the chilly Mistress whom most children of earth dread.  When I think the matter over I become convinced that no one who has once felt a noble and gentle sorrow can ever become wholly bad; and I fancy that even the bad, when once a real sorrow has pierced them, have a chance of becoming good.  So in strange ways the things that seem hard to bear steadily tend to make the world better.  When the bell tolls and the brown earth gapes and the form of the loved one is passed from sight for ever, it is bitter—­ah, how bitter!  But the chastening touch of Time takes away the bitterness, and there is left only an intense gentleness which seeks to soothe those who suffer; and the mother whose babe seemed to take her very heart away when it went into the Darkness can pity the other bereaved ones; so that her soul is exalted through its grief.  The poet is thought by some to have uttered a mere aimless whim in words when he said—­

      “To Sorrow
      I bade good-morrow,
  And thought to leave her far away behind;
      But cheerly, cheerly,
      She loves me dearly—­
  She is so constant to me and so kind. 
      I would deceive her,
      And so leave her;
  But, ah, she is so constant and so kind!”

It sounds like a whim; but it is more than that to those who have been in the depths of grief; for they know that out of their affliction grew either a solemn scorn of worldly ills or a keen wish to be helpful to others.

I have no desire to utter a paradox when I say that all the world holds of best has sprung from sorrow.  Shakspere smiles and is still.  I love the smiles of his wiser years; but they would never have been so calmly content, so cheering with all their inscrutable depth, had not the man been weighed down with some dark sorrow before his soul was rescued and purified.  I do not care for him when he is grinning and merry.  He could play the buffoon when he willed—­and a very unpleasant buffoon he was in his day; but Sorrow claimed him, and he came forth purified to speak to us by Prospero’s lips.  He had his struggle to compass resignation, he even seems to have felt himself degraded, and there is almost a weak complaint in that terrible sonnet, “No longer mourn for me when I am dead;” but his heart-strings held; he kept his dignity at the last, and he gave us the splendours of “The Tempest.”  I have no manner of superstition about the great poet—­indeed I feel sure that at one time of his life he was what we call a bad man, his self-reproaches hinting all too plainly at forms of wickedness, moral wickedness, which pass far beyond the ordinary vice which society condemns—­but I am sure that he became as good as he was serene; and I like to trace the phases of his sorrow up to the time of his triumph.