we not
feel that the _race_ is really _One_, that a common grief again unites
it, that in this _oneness_ we are all justly partakers in the sin of
Adam, that in this _oneness_ we may partake of the glory of the Brother
who died to _unite_ the finite with the Infinite?

It is to this essential _unity_ of the race that the dramatist owes much
of his power; for let him but strike the common strings of grief and
love, and the crowd at once show by their words, their gestures, their
looks, and often by their tears, their earnest sympathy. Even at the
spectacle of an imaginary grief their hearts are moved, the sorrow
thrills through every soul; if the poet has been true to nature, they
feel that his imaginary characters are but part and parcel of themselves
in their woe. Thus the emotion excited by dramatic representations has
its source in the very root of our being, the _unity_ of our common
nature, in our common brotherhood; consequently, neither in the
instincts of the body nor the caprices of the poetic fancy. If the poet
would not break the bond, let him respect the _unities_ of nature,
whatever view he may take of those of convention. It is to this
wonderful unity with our common nature that the greatest of all
uninspired writers, Shakspeare, owes his universal acknowledgment, his
unequalled power.

If, as we have labored to teach, matter always symbolizes mind, we
should expect to find it also pervaded with the unity pertaining to its
lower rank, and so indeed we find it. In its noblest form the unity of
matter is that organization of it which builds it into living temples
for the indwelling spirits, those houses not made with hands--the bodies
of noble men, of fair and loving women.

In a lower form, it gives that sweet and strange affinity which adds the
glory of orderly arrangement to its elements, gifting them with the fair
variety of change and assimilation that turns the dust into crystal, and
separates the waters above the firmament from those below. It is the
walking and clinging _together_ that gives power to the winds, weight to
the waves, heat to the sunbeams, and stability to the mountains. It is
the 'clinging together' which throws our syllables into words, gives
metre to poetry, and melody and harmony to sound. Indeed, the clinging
together of sounds, as seized by the ear in _time_, with the ever
forming and living ebb and flow of widely different rhythms, exerting
the most mysterious influences upon