The dashing rocks, thy seasick weary bark! Here's to my love! * * * Thus with a kiss I die. Surely this is not the language of the believer. Nor has Romeo any illusions about death: Oh here Will I set up my everlasting rest; And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh. And to think that Romeo had a Catholic priest for a friend! But it shows how clean Shakespeare's mind was from "such fantasies * * * more than cool reason ever comprehends." * And when Romeo takes his farewell of Juliet, his thought is equally free from fancies: Eyes, look your last! Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you, The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss, A dateless bargain to engrossing death. Nothing could be more un-Catholic and un-Protestant than this parting of Shakespeare's best lovers. Juliet, who has often knelt before the priest, dies without one appeal to religion for comfort or support. She has no faith, now, in the hour of her greatest need, in prayer, crucifix, Bible or church. "Go, get thee hence," she cries to the friar when he approaches to minister to her in her crushing sorrow. She follows Romeo without uttering one word about God, or the future. In the same spirit, "The rest is silence," murmurs Hamlet as he sinks to the ground, and we may announce with considerable assurance that the words are Shakespeare's as much as they are Hamlet's. ** But the naturalism of the poet as opposed to the supernaturalism of the religion of his day is further brought out by the free and uninterrupted operation in his plays of the law of action and reaction, of cause and consequence. It is no angel of heaven, as we read of in Scripture, that exalts or strikes down the people in Shakespeare's world; but by their own acts they rise or fall. Intemperance brings Timon of Athens to the dust; folly ruins Othello; insolence cuts Corialanus' career short; ambition and superstition strangle Macbeth; hypocrisy subjects Angello to the contempt of his fellows; hatred and revenge blight the life of Shylock. Heaven plays no part on Shakespeare's stage. Man reaps as he sows, and no gods are necessary to enforce cause and effect. If Nature's laws defy the power of man, do they bend or break when gods command? Pride, shame, intemperance, greed, hate--these can never lead to happiness, all the gods to the contrary. Nor can all the powers of heaven and hell turn self-restraint, moderation, justice, contentment, courage, love and peace, into demons of hell. Nature is sound; Nature is all-sufficient, and in Shakespeare Nature occupies the stage so completely as to leave neither room nor necessity for any other power. * Midsummer's Night's Dream. ** We are neither recommending nor condemning Shakespeare's attitude toward the question of another life, but simply endeavoring to represent it.