of subtlety
compatible with an individual self,--the subtilest of authors, and
only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of
life, is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He
clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if
they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have
left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in
language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent
humanity[643] cooerdinates 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 Shakspeare 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.

20. 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 favor. 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.

21. 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