be left him, and it comes to Othello as he is dying! "I kiss'd thee,
'ere I kill'd thee."

He fastens on this as a starving man fastens on a crumb of bread.

Why is this so true as to be almost intolerable--and yet so beautiful?
The characters have art necessities. Schiller said Art has its
categorical Imperatives--its _must_, and Shakespeare's characters
fulfil them. We feel how inevitable is their fate. They make their own
tragedy. The Poet compresses a Life Tragedy into a few pages of
manuscript. He, with the great sense and Idea of Human Life in him,
has to choose what he will portray, and the greater an artist the more
unerring is his selection. Then begins his own absorption in the
characters. Conception and expression come to him and come nobly and
spontaneously--and so spontaneous is his touch--so completely is he
absorbed in, and one with his characters--that it makes our rush of
sympathy as spontaneous as his own.

We feel the Identification of Shakespeare with Othello--with
Iago--with Desdemona He _is_ them _all_. _He_, William Shakespeare, is
"the will-less--time-less--subject of knowledge," living in "pure
knowing" and absorbed in the creations that represent his varied and
his intuitive knowledge of the great Idea of Life. And he excites and
suggests in us the same absorption in his creations--that is, if we
have the capacity to feel it.

It is a land of marvel and of mystery when all personal interests and
all consciousness of individual temperaments are lost, fall off from
us, and nothing remains, nothing exists to us but the love, the
betrayal, the agony, and the struggles of the noble nature, that "dies