For the rest, if Ariosto has often been compared to contemporary painters, with the object of drawing attention to his harmonic inspiration, Ludwig has been unable to abstain from making similar comparisons for Shakespeare. He found the most adequate image for his dramas in the portraits and landscapes of Titian, of Giorgione, of Paul Veronese, as contrasting with the amiability of Correggio, the insipidity of the Caracci, the affected manner of Guido and of Carlo Dolce, the crudity of the naturalists Caravaggio and Ribera. In Shakespeare, as in those great Venetians, there is everywhere "existence," life upon earth, transfigured perhaps, but devoid of restlessness, of aureoles and of sentimentalisms, serene even where tragic. This sense of strife in vital unity, this profound sense of life, prevents the vision from becoming simplified and superficialised in the antitheses of good and evil, of elect and reprobate beings, and causes the introduction of conflict, in varying measure and degree, in every being. Thus the battle is fought at the very heart of things. Hence the aspect of mystery that surrounds the actions and events portrayed by Shakespeare, which is not to be understood in the general sense that every vision of art is a mystery, but rather in the special sense of a course of events of which the poet not only does not possess (and could not possess) the philosophical explanation, but never discovers the reposeful term, peace after war, the acceptance of war as a means to a more lofty peace. For this reason is everywhere diffused the terror of the Unknown, which surrounds on every side and conceals a countenance that may be more terrible than terrible life itself, in the development of which human beings are involved--a countenance terrible for what it will reveal, and perhaps sublime and ecstatic, giving in its very terribleness, terror and rapture together. The mystery lies not only in the occasional appearance of spectres, demons, witches, in the poetry, but in the whole atmosphere of which they form only a part, assisting by their presence in a more direct determination. This mystery was well expressed by the first great critics who penetrated into the world of Shakespearean poetry, Herder and Goethe, to the second of whom belongs the simile of the Shakespearean drama as "open books of Destiny, in which blows the wind of emotional life here and there stripping their leaves in its violence." In Shakespeare's musicality we are everywhere sensible of a voluptuous palpitation before the mystery which at times reflects upon itself and supplies the link between music and love, music and sadness, music and unknown Godhead.