To the same effect, we may quote the preliminary sentence of Shakspere's will: "I commend my soul into the hands of God, my Creator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life everlasting." With such a master of words, this avowal would be no mere formality. During Shakspere's last residence at Stratford, moreover, the town was under strong religious influences. Many a "great man in Israel," in fraternal visits to the Rev. Richard Byfield, the vicar, is said to have been hospitably entertained at New Place; and memorable evenings must have been spent in converse on the highest themes. In addition to all this, the following sonnet furnishes an interesting proof that the heart of Shakspere, at an earlier period, had not been unsusceptible to religious sentiments and aspirations:-- "Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of thine excess, Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end? Then, soul, live thou upon thy body's loss, And let that pine to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed, without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men, And, death once dead, there's no more dying then." --_Sonnet_ 146. All that such words suggest we gladly admit among the probabilities of Shakspere's unknown life. But in his dramas themselves we find no assured grasp of the highest spiritual truth, nothing to show that such truth controlled his views of life with imperial sway; little or nothing to uplift the reader from the play of human passions and the entanglement of human interests to the higher realms of Faith. It is the same Shakspere who reveals the depths of human corruption, and the nobleness of human excellence. But in portraying the latter, he stops short, and fails exactly where the higher light of faith would have enabled him to complete the delineation. His best and greatest characters are a law unto themselves: his men are passionate and strong; his women are beautiful, with a loveliness that scarcely ever reminds us of heaven: he has neither "raised the mortal to the skies," nor "brought the angel down."