Mathilde Blind, C. 1894 (1841-1896)
“Shakespeare.”
Yearning to know herself for all she was,
Her passionate clash of warring good and ill,
Her new life ever ground in Death’s old mill,
With every delicate detail and en masse,—
Blind Nature strove. Lo, then it came to pass,
That Time, to work out her unconscious will,
Once wrought the mind which she had groped to fill,
And she beheld herself as in a glass.
The world of men, unrolled before our sight,
Showed like a map, where stream and waterfall,
And village-cradling vale and cloud-capped height
Stand faithfully recorded, great and small,
For Shakespeare was, and at his touch with light
Impartial as the sun’s, revealed the All.
“Shakespeare Sonnets, VII.” Poetical Works. Ed. Arthur Symons. 1900, p. 443.