Then here, by the sounding sea, Forest, and greenwood tree, Here to solicit thee cease shall we never: Yes, thou effulgence bright, Here must thy flame relight, Or vanish from Nature for ever and ever! _Songs._ By the Ettrick Shepherd. Now first collected. 1831, p. 304. CHARLES LAMB, 1833 (1775-1834) I am jealous of the combination of the sister arts. Let them sparkle apart. What injury (short of the theatres) did Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery do me with Shakespeare?—to have Opie’s Shakespeare, Northcote’s Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli’s Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney’s Shakespeare, wooden-headed West’s Shakespeare (though he did the best in “Lear”), deaf-headed Reynolds’s Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody’s Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen’s portrait! To confine the illimitable! Letter to Samuel Rogers, December 21, 1833. _Works of Charles and Mary Lamb._ Ed. E. V. Lucas, 1903-4. Vol. vii. HARTLEY COLERIDGE, 1833 (1796-1849) “_To Shakespeare._” The soul of man is larger than the sky, Deeper than ocean, or the abysmal dark Of the unfathom’d centre. Like that Ark, Which in its sacred hold uplifted high, O’er the drown’d hills, the human family, And stock reserved of every living kind, So in the compass of the single mind The seeds and pregnant forms in essence lie, That make all worlds. Great Poet, ’twas thy art To know thyself, and in thyself to be Whate’er love, hate, ambition, destiny, Or the firm, fatal purpose of the heart, Can make of Man. Yet thou wert still the same, Serene of thought, unhurt by thy own flame. _Poems._ Sonnet XXVIII. 1833, p. 28. THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1838 (1785-1859) In the great world of woman, as the interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunar varieties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakespeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, _this_ is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, _that_ is another.... In all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakespeare has found the power for effectually working this mysterious mode of being? . . . . . . .