He was "not for a season, but for all time." He excelled as a dramatist, but as we have shown by these few extracts, he was also a metaphysician, a prophet, and a poet. The plots of his many plays are largely adaptations from other authors, but their glorification by Shakespeare's genius transformed them and may be likened to the glorification of the natural man by the genius of Jesus. For example, Pythagoras taught that the universe was harmonized in a masterful symphony, with suns, stars, and planets as notes on the staff supreme. Shakespeare evidently got from this his cue for the exquisite lines uttered by Lorenzo:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it