your affections
Would become tender."

On which Prospero remarks,--

"Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions?"

Now, whether Shakspeare intended it or not, it is not possible after
this for the reader to think of Ariel but in a human form; for slight
as these hints are, if they do not indicate the moral affections, they
at least imply something akin to them, which in a manner compels us to
invest the gentle Spirit with a general likeness to our own physical
exterior, though, perhaps, as indistinct as the emotion that called
for it.

We have thus considered the human being in his complex condition, of
body and spirit, or physical and moral; showing the impossibility of
even thinking of him in the one, to the exclusion of the other. We
may, indeed, successively think first of the form, and then of
the moral character, as we may think of any one part of either
analytically; but we cannot think of the _human being_ except
as a _whole_. It follows, therefore, as a consequence, that no
imitation of man can be true which is not addressed to us in this
double condition. And here it may be observed, that in Art there is
this additional requirement, that there be no discrepancy between the
form and the character intended,--or rather, that the form _must_
express the character, or it expresses nothing: a necessity which is
far from being general in actual nature. But of this hereafter.

Let us now endeavour to form some general notion of Man in his various
aspects, as presented by the myriads which people the earth. But whose
imagination is equal to the task,--to the setting in array before it
the countless multitudes, each individual in his proper form, his
proper character? Were this possible, we should stand amazed at the
interminable differences, the hideous variety; and that, too, no less
in the moral, than in the physical; nay, so opposite and appalling in
the former as hardly to be figured by a chain of animals, taking for
the extremes the fierce and filthy hyena and the inoffensive lamb.
This is man in the concrete,--to which, according to some, is to be
applied the _abstract Ideal!_

Now let us attempt to conceive of a being that shall represent all the
diversities of mind, affections, and dispositions, that fleck this
heterogeneous mass of humanity, and then to conceive of a Form that
shall be in such perfect affinity with it as to indicate them all. The
bare statement of th