get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his homebred
speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,--

"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and
perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he
would do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of
immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear
thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently
capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate
intentionally in others. The difficult passages in the plays, then, are
to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the
natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at
a clearer theory and better understanding of it.

While we believe that our language had two periods of culmination 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