that limb, it might be replied, was the right arm. "The kingly-crownèd
head, the vigilant eye," whose empire of thought and whose reach of
vision no other man's faculty has ever been found competent to match,
are Shakespeare's alone forever: but the force of hand, the fire of
heart, the fervor of pity, the sympathy of passion, not poetic or
theatric merely, but actual and immediate, are qualities in which the
lesser poet is not less certainly or less unmistakably pre-eminent than
the greater. And there is no third to be set beside them: not even if we
turn from their contemporaries to Shelley himself. All that Beatrice
says in _The Cenci_ is beautiful and conceivable and admirable: but
unless we except her exquisite last words--and even they are more
beautiful than inevitable--we shall hardly find what we find in "King
Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and "The Duchess of Malfy"--the
tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might
call it, of certitude.

There are poets--in our own age, as in all past ages--from whose best
work it might be difficult to choose at a glance some verse sufficient
to establish their claim--great as their claim may be--to be remembered
forever; and who yet may be worthy of remembrance among all but the
highest. Webster is not one of these: though his fame assuredly does not
depend upon the merit of a casual passage here or there, it would be
easy to select from any one of his representative plays such examples of
the highest, the purest, the most perfect power, as can be found only in
the works of the greatest among poets. There is not, as far as my
studies have ever extended, a third English poet to whom these words
might rationally be attributed by the conjecture of a competent reader:

We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
Nay, cease to die, by dying.