en material we impress a pre-determined form, not
necessarily arising out of the properties of the material;--as when to a
mass of wet clay we give whatever shape we wish it to retain when
hardened. The organic form, on the other hand is innate; it shapes, as it
developes, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one
and the same with the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is,
such is the form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in
diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms;--each exterior is the
physiognomy of the being within,--its true image reflected and thrown out
from the concave mirror;--and even such is the appropriate excellence of
her chosen poet, of our own Shakespeare,--himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof
positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakespeare by
this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human
faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the
coincidence of the two (a feeling _sui generis et demonstratio
demonstrationum_) called the conscience, the understanding or prudence,
wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,--and then of the objects on which these
are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming caprices
of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the actual and the
ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or as a social being,
as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or in a war-field of
temptation;--and then compare with Shakespeare under each of these heads
all or any of the writers in prose and verse that have ever lived! Who,
that is competent to judge, doubts the result?--And ask your own hearts--ask
your own common-sense--to conceive the possibility of this man being--I say
not, the drunken savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to
their shame, have honoured before their elder and better worthies,--but the
anomalous, the wild, the irregular, genius of our daily criticism! What!
are we to have miracles in sport?--Or, I speak reverently, does God choose
idiots by whom to convey divine truths to man?

Recapitulation, And Summary Of the Characteristics of Shakespeare's
Dramas.

In lectures, of which amusement forms a large part of the object, ther