he windiest gospel ever yet preached,
which never has saved and never will save any man from moral
corruption."

It were something beside my purpose to unfold and illustrate in detail
the common principles of Art: I shall but endeavour to do this so far
as may be needful for a due understanding of those principles as we
have them embodied in the Shakespearian Drama.

The first of those principles, as I am to view them, is what I know
not better how to designate than by the term _Solidarity_. By which I
mean that the several parts of a given work must all stand in mutual
sympathy and intelligence; or that the details must not only have each
a force and meaning of their own, but must also be helpful, directly
or remotely, to the force and meaning of the others; all being drawn
together and made to coalesce in unity of effect by some one governing
thought or paramount idea. This gives us what the philosophers of Art
generally agree in calling an _organic structure_; that is, a
structure in which an inward vital law shapes and determines the
outward form; all the parts being, moreover, assimilated and bound
each to each by the life that builds the organization, and so
rendered mutually aidant, and at the same time conducive to the
well-being of the whole. In a word, they must all have a purpose and a
truth in common as well as each a truth and purpose of its own.

To illustrate this in a small instance, and perhaps the more
intelligible for being small.--Critics had been wont to speak lightly,
not to say sneeringly, of the Sonnet, as being but an elaborate trifle
that cost more than it came to. Wordsworth undertook to vindicate the
thing from this unjust reproach, as he considered it; and to that end
he wrote the following:

"Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd,
Mindless of its just honours: with this key
Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camoeens sooth'd an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glitter'd a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crown'd
His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp,
It cheer'd mild Spenser, call'd from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains,--alas, too few!"

Now, here we have a pl