When a man can READ, his paroxysm of feeling is passing.
When he can READ, his thought has slackened its hold .-- You talk about reading Shakspeare, using him as an expression for the highest intellect, and you wonder that any common person should be so presumptuous as to suppose his thought can rise above the text which lies before him.

But think a moment.

A child's reading of Shakspeare is one thing, and Coleridge's or Schlegel's reading of him is another.

The saturation-point of each mind differs from that of every other.

But I think it is as true for the small mind which can only take up a little as for the great one which takes up much, that the suggested trains of thought and feeling ought always to rise above--not the author, but the reader's mental version of the author, whoever he may be.
I think most readers of Shakspeare sometimes find themselves thrown into exalted mental conditions like those produced by music.