Excerpt from Recovered Yesterdays in Literature

In Shakespeare was an abundant love of life. The vital streams had not run dry in the channels of his spirit, rather were in spring freshet, overflowing the banks and inundating meadow lands and fields. When Shakespeare touches us we feel a vital shock, as if an electrode of the lightning had, in passing, grasped our wrists. He is no dyspeptic, with hung head and dolorous voice and mendacious replies and invective speech. He does not rage as Walter Savage Landor did, is not bellicose with sword at play as Shelley was, nor mild and remote as Wordsworth. He was impassioned as the storm, but sane and wholesome, he was like contact with the earth.

Charles Lamb - pale, slender, cloaked, nervous, stammering, playful, a delightful sort of human kitten, on his way now from the East India countinghouse to his half-mad, crabbed old father and Mary his sister, with insanity haunting her eyes - is loitering a moment buying at the Strand a volume of old plays and hiding it like a miser's treasure beneath his cloak.

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