e imagination, those eternally fixed types of action and passion,
would come, not so much from the conscious invention of the artist, as
from his self-surrender to the suggestions of an abstract reason or
ideality in things: they would be evolved by the stir of nature itself,
realising the highest reach of its dormant reason: they would have a
kind of prevenient necessity to rise at some time to the surface of the
human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the favourite illustration of
such criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first suggestion in
Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of a waywardness that plays
with the parts careless of the impression of the whole; what supervenes
is the constraining unity of effect, the ineffaceable impression, of
Hamlet or Macbeth. His hand moving freely is curved round as if by
some law of gravitation from within: an energetic unity or identity
makes itself visible amid an abounding variety. This unity or identity
Coleridge exaggerates into something like the identity of a natural
organism, and the associative act which effected it into something
closely akin to the primitive power of nature itself. "In the
Shakespearian drama," he says, "there is a vitality which grows and
evolves itself from within."

[80] Again--

He, too, worked in the spirit of nature, by evolving the germ from
within, by the imaginative power, according to the idea. For as the
power of seeing is to light, so is an idea in mind to a law in nature.
They are correlatives which suppose each other.

Again--

The organic form is innate: it shapes, as it develops, 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, and even such is the appropriate excellence of
Shakespeare, himself a nature humanised, a genial understanding,
directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even
than our consciousness.+

In this late age we are become so familiarised with the greater works
of art as to be little sensitive of the act of creation in them: they
do not impress us as a new presence in the world. Only sometimes, in
productions which realise immediately a profound influence and enforce
a change in taste, we are actual