with us: believing that God will be kind to the wicked, as he has been kind to the good in making them good, we cannot give up the comforting hope that, after the day of retribution, the fratricidal king may find rest. No poet save Goethe approaches Shakespeare in the tolerant and emancipated point of view from which he contemplates humanity. On account of this surpassing excellence, some, fired by the restless presumption of their own infirmities, have dared to find fault with Shakespeare; they have blamed him because he has exhibited moral ugliness unveiled, because he was not sufficiently patriotic, and because he seemed more skeptical than was fitting. Imperturbable assurance! As if Shakespeare's far-seeing vision and penetrating insight could anywhere detect inexcusable vice; as if his mighty mind could be fettered by the littleness of skepticism, or could condescend to the selfishness of patriotism! Is it really a matter for regret to any mortal that Shakespeare has not given us the demented twaddle of the Civis Romanus?

From the evidence of his sonnets and of different playsindeed, from the character of Hamlet himself—there can be no doubt that Shakespeare was at one time much tried, disheartened, and oppressed by the harsh experiences of life; he began, doubtless, as many others have done, by thinking life" a paradise," and found it, as others have done, "only a Vauxhall." But as Goethe advanced from the storminess of Werter to the calmness of Faust, so did Shakespeare rise in a glorious development from the subjective character of Timon to that lofty and pure region of clear vision from which he contemplated the actions of men with infinite calmness. His practical life was correspondent; by bending his actions to the yoke of his intellectual life—by living, in fact, his philosophy-he was able to work steadily in the painful sphere of his vocation to the end which he had proposed to himself. If Hamlet is a reflex of Shakespeare's character, it reflects a period ere it had attained to its full development—a stage in which the struggle between the feeling of the painful experi

ences of life and the intellectual appreciation of them as events was actively going on-in which his nature was not yet in harmony with itself; but the crowning development of his philosophy seems to have been to look on all events with a serene and passionless gaze as inevitable effects of antecedent causes to be nowise moved by the vices of men, and to see in their virtues the evolution of their nature. It is a probable conjecture which has been made, therefore, that Hamlet was sketched out at an earlier period of his life than that at which it was published, and that it was kept by him for some time and much modified, the soliloquies and large generalizations being some of them perhaps thus introduced, and the action of the play thereby delayed. The Hamlet of his youth may thus have been alloyed with a more advanced philosophy, and a character progressively elaborated which seems almost overweighted with intellectual preponderance. If this be so, it may account for the strange circumstance, that at the beginning of the play Hamlet is represented as wishing to go back to school at Wittenberg, when, as the graveyard scene proves, he must have been about thirty years of age.

The metaphysician who would gain a just conception of what human freedom is, could scarce do better than study the relations of the human will in the events of life as these are exhibited in the play of "Hamlet." It represents the abstract and brief chronicle of human life, and, faithfully holding the mirror up to Nature, it teaches-better than all philosophical disquisition and minute introspective analysis can-how is evolved the drama in which human will contends with necessity. Struggle as earnestly and as constantly as he may, the reflecting mortal must feel at the end of all, that he is inevitably what he is; that his follies and his virtues are alike his fate; that there is "a divinity which shapes his ends, rough-hew them as he may." Hamlet, the man of thought, may brood over possibilities, speculate on events, analyze motives, and purposely delay action; but in the end he is, equally with Macbeth, the man of energetic action

whom the darkest hints of the witches arouse to desperate deeds, drawn on to the unavoidable issue. Mighty, it must be allowed, is the power of the human will; that which, to him whose will is not developed, is fate, is, to him who has a well-fashioned will, power; so much has been conquered from necessity, so much has been taken from the devil's territory. The savage prostrates himself, powerless, prayerful, and pitiable, before the flashing lightning; but the developed mortal lays hold of the lightning and makes of it a very useful servant: to the former, lightning is a fate against which will is helpless; to the latter, will is a fate against which lightning is helpless. What limit, then, to the power of will, when so much of fate is ignorance? The limit which there necessarily is to the contents of the continent, to the comprehended of that which comprehends it. The unrelenting circle of necessity encompasses all: one may go his destined course with tranquil resignation, and another may fume, and fret, and struggle; but, willing or unwilling, both must go. As the play of "Hamlet" so instructively teaches, notwithstanding all the ingenious refinements of a powerful meditation, the human will is included within the larger sphere of necessity or natural law. The cage may be a larger or a smaller one, but its bars are always there. แ "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Then Job answered and said: 'Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth."" Well, then, is it for him who learns his limitation, to whom the dark horizon of necessity be comes the sunlit circle of duty.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG.*

FEW are the readers, and we cannot boast to be of those few, who have been at the pains to toil through the many and voluminous writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Indeed, it would not be far from the truth to say that there are very few persons who have thought it worth their while to study him at all seriously; he is commonly accounted a madman, who has had the singular fortune to persuade certain credulous persons that he was a seer. Nevertheless, whether lunatic or prophet, his character and his writings merit a serious and unbiassed study. A madness, which makes its mark upon the world, and counts in its train many presumably sane people who see in it the highest wisdom, cannot justly be put aside contemptuously as undeserving a moment's grave thought. After all, there is no accident in madness; causality, not casualty, governs its appearance in the universe; and it is very far from being a good and sufficient practice to simply mark its phenomena, and straightway to pass on as if they belonged, not to an order, but to a disorder of events that called for no explanation. It is certain that there is in Swedenborg's revelations of the spiritual world a mass of absurdities sufficient to warrant the worst suspicions of his mental sanity; but, at the same time, it is not less certain that there are scattered in his writings conceptions of the highest philosophic reach, while throughout them is sensible an exalted tone of calm moral feeling which rises in many places to a

*Journal of Mental Science, No. 70.

real moral grandeur. These are the qualities which have gained him his best disciples, and they are qualities too uncommon in the world to be lightly despised, in whatever company they may be exhibited. I proceed, then, to give some account of Swedenborg, not purposing to make any review of his multitudinous publications, or any criticism of the doctrines announced in them with a matchless self-sufficiency; the immediate design being rather to present, by the help mainly of Mr. White's book, a sketch of the life and character of the man, and thus to obtain, and to endeavor to convey, some definite notion of what he was, what he did, and what should be concluded of him. *

The first condition of fairly understanding and justly appraising any character is to know something of the stock from which it has sprung. For grapes will not grow on thorns, nor figs on thistles; and, if the fathers have eaten sour grapes, the children's teeth will not fail to be set on edge. At the end of all the most subtile and elaborate disquisitions concerning moral freedom and responsibility, the stern fact remains that the inheritance of a man's descent weighs on him through life as a good or a bad fate. How can he escape from his an

*Emanuel Swedenborg: His Life and Writings. By William White. In two volumes. 1867.-As the present purpose is not to make any criticism of Mr. White's laborious and useful work, I shall not again refer especially to it, although making large use of the materials which it furnishes for a study of Swedenborg; I may once for all commend it to the attention of those who are interested in obtaining an impartial account of the life and works of the prophet of the New Jerusalem. Mr. White does not appear to have formed for himself any definite theory with regard to Swedenborg's pretensions, but is apt, after having told something remarkable of him, to break out into a sort of Carlylian foam of words, which, however, when it has subsided, leaves matters much as they were. Perhaps his book is none the worse for the absence of a special theory, as we get a fair and unbiassed selection from Swedenborg's conversation and writings, and a candid account of the events of his life. At the same time it will obviously be necessary, sooner or later, that the world come to a definite conclusion with regard to his character and pretensions. If man can attain to a gift of seership, and has in him the faculty of becoming what Swedenborg claimed to be, it is surely time that some exact investigation should be made of the nature of the faculty, and that we should set ourselves diligently to work to discover the track of so remarkable a development,