“That arch-rationalist Bertrand Russell once said that the mystery of Shakespeare lies in understanding why lines that are all allusion and enchantment—like ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ or ‘A great while ago the world began’ or ‘Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind’—have what he called ‘mental content’; that is, they assert actual propositions, states of affairs that we can entertain and appraise. They sound like music and read like law. Magic that makes sense to mind: that seems to be as good a definition, or encirclement, of Shakespeare’s art as we are likely to get.”