rms of every faculty and feeling, but he
could follow them by anticipation, intuitively, into all their
conceivable ramifications, through every change of fortune or conflict
of passion, or turn of thought. He had "a mind reflecting ages past,"
and present:--all the people that ever lived are there. There was no
respect of persons with him. His genius shone equally on the evil and on
the good, on the wise and the foolish, the monarch and the beggar: "All
corners of the earth, kings, queens, and states, maids, matrons, nay,
the secrets of the grave," are hardly hid from his searching glance. He
was like the genius of humanity, changing places with all of us at
pleasure, and playing with our purposes as with his own. He turned the
globe round for his amusement, and surveyed the generations of men, and
the individuals as they passed, with their different concerns, passions,
follies, vices, virtues, actions, and motives--as well those that they
knew, as those which they did not know, or acknowledge to themselves.
The dreams of childhood, the ravings of despair, were the toys of his
fancy. Airy beings waited at his call, and came at his bidding. Harmless
fairies "nodded to him, and did him curtesies": and the night-hag
bestrode the blast at the command of "his so potent art." The world of
spirits lay open to him, like the world of real men and women: and there
is the same truth in his delineations of the one as of the other; for if
the preternatural characters he describes could be supposed to exist,
they would speak, and feel, and act, as he makes them. He had only to
think of any thing in order to become that thing, with all the
circumstances belonging to it. When he conceived of a character, whether
real or imaginary, he not only entered into all its thoughts and
feelings, but seemed instantly, and as if by touching a secret spring,
to be surrounded with all the same objects, "subject to the same skyey
influences," the same local, outward, and unforeseen accidents which
would occur in reality. Thus the character of Caliban not only stands
before us with a language and manners of its own, but the scenery and
situation of the enchanted island he inhabits, the traditions of the
place, its strange noises, its hidden recesses, "his frequent haunts and
ancient neighbourhood," are given with a miraculous truth of nature, and
with all the familiarity of an old recollection. The whole "coheres
semblably together" in time,