existing only in imagination, possess such truth and consistency,
that even when deformed monsters like Caliban, he extorts the
conviction, that if there should be such beings, they would so
conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries with him the most
fruitful and daring fancy into the kingdom of nature,--on the other
hand, he carries nature into the regions of fancy, lying beyond the
confines of reality. We are lost in astonishment at seeing the
extraordinary, the wonderful, and the unheard of, in such intimate
nearness.

'If Shakespeare deserves our admiration for his characters, he is
equally deserving of it for his exhibition of passion, taking this
word in its widest signification, as including every mental
condition, every tone from indifference or familiar mirth to the
wildest rage and despair. He gives us the history of minds; he lays
open to us, in a single word, a whole series of preceding
conditions. His passions do not at first stand displayed to us in
all their height, as is the case with so many tragic poets, who, in
the language of Lessing, are thorough masters of the legal style of
love. He paints, in a most inimitable manner, the gradual progress
from the first origin. "He gives", as Lessing says, "a living
picture of all the most minute and secret artifices by which a
feeling steals into our souls; of all the imperceptible advantages
which it there gains; of all the stratagems by which every other
passion is made subservient to it, till it becomes the sole tyrant
of our desires and our aversions." Of all poets, perhaps, he alone
has pourtrayed the mental diseases,--melancholy, delirium, lunacy,--
with such inexpressible, and, in every respect, definite truth, that
the physician may enrich his observations from them in the same
manner as from real cases.