man comes out decisively here. It is
unexampled, I think, that calm creative perspicacity of Shakespeare. The
thing he looks at reveals not this or that face of it, but its inmost
heart, and generic secret: it dissolves itself as in light before him,
so that he discerns the perfect structure of it. Creative, we said:
poetic creation, what is this too but _seeing_ the thing sufficiently?
The _word_ that will describe the thing, follows of itself from such
clear intense sight of the thing. And is not Shakespeare's _morality_,
his valour, candour, tolerance, truthfulness; his whole victorious
strength and greatness, which can triumph over such obstructions,
visible there too? Great as the world! No _twisted_, poor convex-concave
mirror, reflecting all objects with its own convexities and concavities;
a perfectly _level_ mirror--that is to say withal, if we will
understand it, a man justly related to all things and men, a good man.
It is truly a lordly spectacle how this great soul takes-in all kinds of
men and objects, a Falstaff, an Othello, a Juliet, a Coriolanus; sets
them all forth to us in their round completeness; loving, just, the
equal brother of all. _Novum Organum_, and all the intellect you will
find in Bacon, is of a quite secondary order; earthy, material, poor in
comparison with this. Among modern men, one finds, in strictness, almost
nothing of the same rank. Goethe alone, since the days of Shakespeare,
reminds me of it. Of him too you say that he _saw_ the object; you may
say what he himself says of Shakespeare: "His characters are like
watches with dial-plates of transparent crystal; they show you the hour
like others, and the inward mechanism also is all visible."

The seeing eye! It is this that discloses the inner harmony of things;
what Nature meant, what musical idea Nature has wrapped-up in these
often rough embodiments. Something she did mean. To the seeing eye that
something were discernible. Are they base, miserable things? You can
laugh over them, you can weep over them; you can in some way or other
genially relate yourself to them--you can, at lowest, hold your peace
about them, turn away your own and others' face from them, till the hour
come for practically exterminating and extinguishing them! At bottom, it
is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect
enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that,
perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he