SOME REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY, &C. 35 



their governable laws, seized on their coincidences, and established 

 truths as immortal as his own spirit. The heart of man — " the 

 centre of this world" — was laid open, as a cabinet, before him, with 

 the secret springs of feeling and passion. He studied the powers 

 and susceptibilities of the instrument, and thereby predicted its 

 operations. Such was Shakspeare, " in apprehension how like a 

 god!" His genius was an Ithuriel spear that unshrined the hid- 

 den spirit of nature and truth. Nature, in a thousand forms and 

 attitudes, sat to him for her portrait, and in his " picture gallery/* 

 as Coleridge finely expresses it, are works which bear no resem- 

 blance but in their master perfection and truth. Without scholar- 

 ship he was profoundly learned — without opportunity he detected 

 character — without rank he elevated his imagination to the throne, 

 and pronounced with the nobility of a king. 



As though he had walked unseen through all states and degrees 

 of life, and possessed men with his own spirit until it became infect- 

 ed with their dispositions. Shakspeare, as a name, is national — as a 

 work, none perhaps so little known in comparison with its worth. 

 That delicacy of fancy, rounding, as with a zone of light, truths 

 the most solemn and associable — that loveliness of virtue — that 

 passion of the affections — that consolation in trouble — that encou- 

 ragement in labour — that delight of intellect ; while Nature, too, 

 in all her loveliness rises up before the mind— 



" Forest, hill, and dale, and green-wood wild." 



It is remarkable that Shakspeare is the only poet whose works 

 have been illustrated by poetry : Homer, Virgil, Horace, are ex- 

 plained and paraphrased ; Chaucer and the older poets, translated ; 

 Milton, criticised : but none other than Shakspeare have been illus- 

 trated by poetry. All the criticisms on Shakspeare are poetical. 

 He is not only poetry himself, but he begets it in others ; he com- 

 municates the faculty as the flower its perfume ; at once surprises 

 the heart and awakens the affections ; and he who possesses them 

 most understands him best. Compared with the chief of modern 

 spirits, Byron, how essential is this difference, — that in Byron, 

 every creation is identified with the poet himself; we never forget 

 the one in the other : but in Shakspeare, no two instances of this 

 relativeness is observable; and for the god-like man himself, we 

 never dream of him beyond the frontispiece : even his name is be- 

 come an attribute which, like Nature, expresses ten thousand ima- 

 ges, but no one distinctively. 



