n one string. An omnipresent
humanity co-ordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story
to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain
observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence,
and which he disposes all to exhibit. He crams this part, and starves
that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his
fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no
importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:
no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no
discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small,
subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong,
as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without
effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and
likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of
power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so
incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other
readers.

This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of
things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has
added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into
natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing
new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without
loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with
compass; the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any
distortion or favour. He carried his powerful execution into minute
details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as
he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature's, will bear the
scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of
production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the
power to make one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch
its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch
a million. There are always objects; but there was never
representation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let
the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given
for the making of a Shakespeare; but the possibility of the
translation of things into song is demonstrated.

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though
their excellence is lost in the splendour