ion in
poetic beauty,--one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads,
which deal only with narrative and feeling,--another of Art, (or Nature
as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately
amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the
greater dramatists,--and that Shakspeare made use of the latter as he
found it, we by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or
that any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great
poet's inkstand. But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and
exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a
genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel
its life in every limb. He enriched it through that exquisite sense of
music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed to be
eagerly obedient, as if every word said to him,

"_Bid me_ discourse, I will enchant thine ear,"--

as if every latent harmony revealed itself to him as the gold to
Brahma, when he walked over the earth where it was hidden, crying,
"Here am I, Lord! do with me what thou wilt!" That he used language
with that intimate possession of its meaning possible only to the most
vivid thought is doubtless true; but that he wantonly strained it from
its ordinary sense, that he found it too poor for his necessities, and
accordingly coined new phrases, or that, from haste or carelessness, he
violated any of its received proprieties, we do not believe. We have
said that it was fortunate for him that he came upon an age when our
language was at its best; but it was fortunate also for us, because our
costliest poetic phrase is put beyond reach of decay in the gleaming
precipitate in which it united itself with his thought.

We do not, therefore, agree with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that the
extravagance of thought and diction which characterizes much of our
modern poetry is traceable to the influence of Shakspeare. We see in it
only the futile effort of misguided persons to torture out of language
the secret of that inspiration which should be in themselves. We do not
find the extravagances in Shakspeare himself. We never saw a line in
any modern poet that reminded us of him, and will venture to assert
that it is only poets of the second class that find successful
imitators. And the reason seems to us a very plain one. The genius of
the great poet seeks repose in the expression of itself, and finds it
at las