icture a
total impression will admit so much. What makes the view distinctive
in Coleridge are the Schellingistic associations with which he colours
it, that faint glamour of the philosophy of nature which was ever
influencing his thoughts. That suggested the idea of a subtly winding
parallel, a 'rapport' in every detail, between the human mind and the
world without it, laws of nature being so many transformed ideas.
Conversely, the ideas of the human mind would be only transformed
laws. Genius would be in a literal sense an exquisitely purged
sympathy with nature. Those associative conceptions of the
imagination, those unforeseen types of passion, would come, not so
much of the artifice and invention of the understanding, as from
self-surrender to the suggestions of nature; they would be evolved by
the stir of nature itself realizing the highest reach of its latent
intelligence; they would have a kind of antecedent necessity to rise
at some time to the surface of the human mind.

It is natural that Shakespeare should be the idol of all such
criticism, whether in England or Germany. The first effect in
Shakespeare is that of capricious detail, of the waywardness that
plays with the parts careless of the impression of the whole. But
beyond there is the constraining unity of effect, the uneffaceable
impression, of _Hamlet_ or _Macbeth_. His hand moving freely is
curved round by some law of gravitation from within; that is, there is
the most constraining unity in the most abundant variety. Coleridge
exaggerates this unity into something like the unity of a natural
organism, the associative act that 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.' 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 exterio