nce most critics, and more especially those who insist
on a stiff regularity, interpret it merely in a mechanical, and not in
an organical sense. Form is mechanical when, through external force,
it is imparted to any material merely as an accidental addition
without reference to its quality; as, for example, when we give a
particular shape to a soft mass that it may retain the same after its
induration. Organical form, again, is innate; it unfolds itself from
within, and requires its determination contemporaneously with the
perfect development of the germ. We everywhere discover such forms in
nature throughout the whole range of living powers, from the
crystallization of salts and minerals to plants and flowers, and from
these again to the human body. In the fine arts, as well as in the
domain of nature, the supreme artist, all genuine forms are organical,
that is, determined by the quality of the work. In a word, the form is
nothing but a significant exterior, the speaking physiognomy of each
thing, which, as long as it is not disfigured by any destructive
accident, gives a true evidence of its hidden essence.

Hence it is evident that the spirit of poetry, which, though
imperishable, migrates, as it were, through different bodies, must, so
often as it is newly born in the human race, mold to itself, out of
the nutrimental substance of an altered age, a body of a different
conformation. The forms vary with the direction taken by the poetical
sense; and when we give to the new kinds of poetry the old names, and
judge of them according to the ideas conveyed by these names, the
application which we make of the authority of classical antiquity is
altogether unjustifiable. No one should be tried before a tribunal to
which he is not amenable. We may safely admit that most of the English
and Spanish dramatic works are neither tragedies nor comedies in the
sense of the ancients; they are romantic dramas. That the stage of a
people in its foundation and formation, who neither knew nor wished to
know anything of foreign models, will possess many peculiarities, and
not only deviate from, but even exhibit a striking contrast to, the
theatres of other nations who had a common model for imitation before
their eyes, is easily supposable, and we should only be astonished
were it otherwise.

[Illustration: #CAROLINE SCHLEGEL#]

But when in two nations, differing so widely as the English and
Spanish in physical, moral, political, and