uickened into a
secondary life. This was felt by Shakspeare,--felt, and at the same
time controlled and guided with the same strictness over all thoughts,
feelings, passions, fancies, that thronged his mind at such moments, as
he had over those in his dull every-day hours. When we are writing, how
difficult it is to avoid pleasing our own vanity! how hard not to step
aside a little, now and then, for a brilliant thought or a poetic fancy,
or any of the thousand illusions that throng upon us! Even for the sake
of a well-sounding phrase we are often tempted to turn. The language of
passion,--how hard it is to feign, to write it! how harder than all, to
keep the tone, serious, or whatever it may be, with which we begin, so
that no expressions occur to break it,--lapses of thought or speech,
that are like sudden stumbles or uneasy jolts! And if this is so in
ordinarily elevated prose, how much more must it be so in high dramatic
poetry, where the poet rides on the whirlwind and tempest of passion and
"directs the storm." There must go to the conception and execution of
this sort of work a resolved mind, strong fancies, thoughts high and
deep, in fine, a multitude of powers, all under the grand creative,
sustaining imagination. When completed, the work stands forth to all
time, a great work of Art, and bulwark of all that is high against all
that is low. It is a great poetic work, the work of a maker who gives
form and direction to the minds of men.

In a certain sense, it is not an extravagance to say that all who are
now living and speak English have views of life and Nature modified by
the influence of Shakspeare. We see the world through his eyes; he has
taught us how to think; the freedom of soul, the strong sense, the
grasp of thought,--above all, the honor, the faith, the love,--who has
imparted such noble ideas of these things as he? Not any one, though
there were giants in those days as well as he. Hence he has grown to
seem even more "natural" than he did in his own day, his judges being
mediately or immediately educated by him. The works are admired, but the
nobleness of soul in him that made them is not perceived, and his genius
and power are degraded into a blind faculty by unthinking minds, and by
vain ones that flatter themselves they have discovered the royal road to
poetry. What they seem to require for poetry is the flash of thought
or fancy that starts the sympathetic thrill,--the little jots,--the
strikin