other blow, said that in witness of her faith she called upon the divine justice, seeing that the world's failed her. And as she called on God to help her, when the third blow followed, she lay slain by the villainous ancient. Then, having laid her in bed, and shattered her head, he and the Moor made the rooftree of the chamber fall, as they had devised between them, and the Moor began to call for help, for the house was falling: at whose voice the neighbors came running, and having uncovered the bed, they found the lady under the roofbeams dead.

We are a long way off Shakespeare in this powerfully dramatic and realistic scene of butchery: it is a far cry from Othello, a nature made up of love and honor, of resolute righteousness and heroic pity, to the relentless and deliberate ruffian whose justice is as brutal in its ferocity as his caution is cold-blooded in its foresight. The sacrificial murder of Desdemona is no butchery, but tragedy -terrible as ever tragedy may be, but not more terrible than beautiful; from the first kiss to the last stab, when the sacrificing priest of retribution immolates the victim whose blood he had forborne to shed for pity of her beauty till impelled to forget his first impulse and shed it for pity of her suffering. His words can bear no other meaning, can imply no other action, that would not be burlesque rather than grotesque in its horror. And the commentators or annotators who cannot understand or will not allow that a man in almost unimaginable passion of anguish may not be perfectly and sedately mindful of consistency and master of himself must explain how Desdemona manages to regain her breath so as to speak three times, and utter the most heavenly falsehood that ever put truth to shame, after being stifled to death. To recover breath enough to speak, to think, and to lie in defence of her slayer, can hardly be less than to recover breath enough to revive and live, if undespatched by some sharper and more summary method of homicide. The fitful and intermittent lack of stage directions which has caused and perpetuated this somewhat short-sighted oversight is not a more obvious evidence of the fact that Shakespeare's text has lost more than any other and lesser poet's for want of the author's revision than is the misplacing of a let

VOL. CIX.-No. 653-83

ter which, as far as I know, has never yet been set right. When Othello hears that Iago has instigated Roderigo to assassinate Cassio, he exclaims, "O villain!" and Cassio ejaculates "Most heathenish, and most gross!" The sense is improved and the metre is rectified when we perceive that the original printer mistook the word "villanie" for the word "villaine." Such corrections of an unrevised text may seem slight and trivial matters to Englishmen who give thanks for the like labor when lavished on second-rate or third-rate poets of classical antiquity: the toil bestowed by a Bentley or a Porson on Euripides or Horace must naturally, in the judgment of universities, seem wasted on Shakespeare or on Shelley.

One of the very few poets to be named with these has left on everlasting record the deliberate expression of his judgment that Othello combines and unites the qualities of King Lear, "the most tremendous effort of Shakespeare as a poet" (a verdict with which I may venture to express my full and absolute agreement), and of Hamlet, his most tremendous effort" as a philosopher or meditator." It may be so: and Coleridge may be right in his estimate that " Othello is the union of the two." I should say myself, but with no thought of setting my opinion against that of the man who at his best was now and then the greatest of all poets and all critics, that the fusion of thought and passion, inspiration and meditation, was at its height in King Lear. But in Othello we get the pure poetry of natural and personal emotion, unqualified by the righteous doubt and conscientious intelligence which instigate and impede the will and the action of Hamlet. The collision and the contrast of passion and intellect, of noble passion and infernal intellect, was never before and can never be again presented and verified as in this most tragic of all tragedies that ever the supreme student of humanity bequeathed for the study of all time. As a poet and a thinker Eschylus was the equal, if not the superior, of Shakespeare; as a creator, a revealer, and an interpreter, infinite in his insight and his truthfulness, his tenderness and his wisdom, his justice and his mercy, no man who ever lived can stand beside the author of Othello.

W

HETHER it was in his blood or not, as they say it is in the blood of some wild animals which invariably, sooner or later, revert to utter savagery, or whether he was unduly restrained by the conditions of his life, which made a reaction inevitable, Adam Andersen, at a time of life when most men have settled into the calm of acquiescence with fate which is to endure until death, broke his bonds. In other words, he went wild, he freed himself from all which had hitherto held him, and was for himself alone, or perhaps for that which was in reality greater than himself or anything which had held him. Perhaps in returning to nature he also returned, in a sense, to God, although he broke, to the execration of all who knew of it, like the woman of the Scriptures, his jar of precious ointment.

Adam Andersen was over forty when he left a wife and four children, and a comfortable home, and went, not to the badthat was not the word for it-but to that which is outside the good or the bad, to freedom from all cords and weights of civilized life. He lived, anyway, on the outskirts of civilization, where he could hear and see, and smell with his sharpened nostrils, that which was outside. He lived in one of the far Western States, on a fine farm which he himself had wrested from the wild. He had a house which was in those parts considered sumptuous, and furniture in those parts considered luxurious. There was a piano, and his daughters took music lessons. In the yard was croquet set, and he used to watch his children playing the game with a sort of whimsical and admiring contempt. When he had been the age of his eldest boy-eight-he had played with a shovel and a hoe in grim earnest for his bread and butter. The eldest boy was eight, the next was five, then there were two girls, one ten, the other nine. An

a

dersen's wife was still good to see-large, and blonde, with a seeming decision of character which, some said, had driven her husband afield. However, people, for the most part, were on her side.

The day after Andersen disappeared, leaving no trace,-for he had planned his escape well,-and his wife appealed to the people in the scattered settlement to aid her, there had been no lack of volunteers, and there had been fierce blame for the man, although he had left his family in easy circumstances, and his wife was considered to have the brain of a man and to be as competent to run the farm as Adam.

Adam Andersen had simply attired himself in some stout clothes and put a few necessaries in the rude old knapsack which he had borne over his shoulders when he first came to those parts, and one night when his wife and family were at a Christmas gathering in the schoolhouse, three miles away, he had stepped -or rather leaped, so glad was the new sense of freedom in him-over the indefinite barrier which kept the settlement from the wild, the civilized man from the savage, and in a trice he was what he had been before he had known himself. He loped like a young wolf along the road farther west. He was a small and wiry man, and his muscles had still the strength and suppleness of youth. He had chosen a strange time for his exit, a night of intense cold, when the stars overhead swarmed in myriads seemingly laced together in a net of frost; but he was warmly clad, and besides he did not mind the cold. He loved it with a fierce animal yearning, for his forefathers had come of a cold climate, and it was the spur of their old impulses which now urged him on. He forged ahead as a Viking might have done at a battle-call, although before him were only wastes of land, instead of sea. He did not seem to feel the cold at all. He

piquant chin."

719

But it was

what Decatur did then. early June, you remember, and on the far end of the Ocean Park fishing-pier were only these two, with just the

66

You ought to know; you wrote it." "So I did, but I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that it ought to mean something charming, which you are."

"I'm not. And I am not accomplished. I don't sing, I don't play, I don't draw.” "Thanks be for that! I don't, either. But I think you are the dearest girl in the world."

At that she turned to him and smiled a little in the way that only Jane could smile.

"You told me that once before, a long time ago, you know."

"And you have not forgotten?" "No. I-you see I didn't want to forget."

Had it been August, or even July, doubtless a great number of vacationists would have been somewhat shocked at

gull overhead.

"But," she said at length, after many other and more important things had been said between them, "what will Aunt Judith say?"

"I suppose she'll think me a lucky dog —and slightly color-blind," chuckled Decatur, joyously. "But come," he went on, helping her to rise and retaining both her hands, swaying them back and forth clasped in his, as children do in the game of London Bridge,-" come," he repeated, impulsively, "while my courage is high let us go and break the news to your aunt Judith."

There was, however, no need. Looming ponderously in the middle distance of the pier's vista, a lorgnette held to her eyes, and a frozen look of horror on her ample features, was Aunt Judith herself.