tion kept
abreast of reason. His imagination was never more vivid, all-informing,
and creative,--never penetrated with more unerring certainty to the
inmost spiritual essence of whatever it touched,--never forced words and
rhythm into more supple instruments of thought and feeling,--than when
it miracled into form the terror and pity and beauty of Lear.

Indeed, the coequal growth of his reason and imagination was owing to
the wider scope and increased energy of the great moving forces of his
being. It relates primarily to the heart rather than the head. It is the
immense fiery force behind his mental powers, kindling them into white
heat, and urging them to efforts almost preternatural,--it is this which
impels the daring thought beyond the limits of positive knowledge, and
prompts the starts of ecstasy in whose unexpected radiance nature and
human life are transfigured, and for an instant shine with celestial
light. In truth he is, relatively, more intellectual in his early than
in his later plays, for in his later plays his intellect is thoroughly
impassioned, and, though it has really grown in strength and
massiveness, it is so fused with imagination and emotion as to be less
independently prominent.

The sources of individuality lie below the intellect; and as Shakespeare
went deeper into the soul of man, he more and more represented the brain
as the organ and instrument of the heart, as the channel through which
sentiment, passion, and character found an intelligible outlet. His own
mind was singularly objective; that is, he saw things as they are in
themselves. The minds of his prominent characters are all subjective,
and see things as they are modified by the peculiarities of their
individual moods and emotions. The very objectivity of his own mind
enables him to assume the subjective conditions of less-emancipated
natures. Macbeth peoples the innocent air with menacing shapes,
projected from his own fiend-haunted imagination; but the same air is
"sweet and wholesome" to the poet who gave being to Macbeth. The
meridian of Shakespeare's power was reached when he created Othello,
Macbeth, and Lear, complex personalities, representing the conflict and
complication of the mightiest passions in colossal forms of human
character, and whose understandings and imaginations, whose perceptions
of nature and human life, and whose weightiest utterances of moral
wisdom, are all thoroughly subjective and individualized. The