The inmost, secretest life of Shakespeare’s Plays came from the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakespeare. We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that IMMANENT something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, that “inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness”, as Browning makes Paracelsus characterize it, “constituting man’s self, is what Is”, as he makes the dying John characterize it, in ‘A Death in the Desert’, that “innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne”, as Mrs. Browning characterizes it, “the hidden Soul”, as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force, co-operated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with, though less quickened than, Shakespeare’s, respond, though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study of Shakespeare’s works. It is a significant fact that Shakespearian critics and editors, for nearly two centuries, have been a ‘genus irritabile’, to which genus Shakespeare himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the LETTER, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavoring to reach, through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. To KNOW a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge--the result of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but little more important to know one rather than another personality. The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they are apocalyptic of great personalities. Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the ages, “Follow me!” Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command: it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the incarnate Word.