" Even the beautiful suggestion that Shakespeare as he
wrote had in mind his own dead little son still fresh and living at his
heart can hardly add more than a touch of additional tenderness to our
perfect and piteous delight in him. And even in her daughter's embrace
it seems hard if his mother should have utterly forgotten the little
voice that had only time to tell her just eight words of that ghost story
which neither she nor we were ever to hear ended. Any one but
Shakespeare would have sought to make pathetic profit out of the child by
the easy means of showing him if but once again as changed and stricken
to the death for want of his mother and fear for her and hunger and
thirst at his little high heart for the sight and touch of her:
Shakespeare only could find a better way, a subtler and a deeper chord to
strike, by giving us our last glimpse of him as he laughed and chattered
with her "past enduring," to the shameful neglect of those ladies in the
natural blueness of whose eyebrows as well as their noses he so stoutly
declined to believe. And at the very end (as aforesaid) it may be that
we remember him all the better because the father whose jealousy killed
him and the mother for love of whom he died would seem to have forgotten
the little brave sweet spirit with all its truth of love and tender sense
of shame as perfectly and unpardonably as Shakespeare himself at the
close of _King Lear_ would seem to have forgotten one who never had
forgotten Cordelia.
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