the essential principles?--Imagine not that I am about to oppose genius
to rules. No! the comparative value of these rules is the very cause to
be tried. The spirit of poetry, like all other living powers, must of
necessity circumscribe itself by rules, were it only to unite power with
beauty. It must embody in order to reveal itself; but a living body is
of necessity an organized one; and what is organization but the
connection of parts in and for a whole, so that each part is at once end
and means?--This is no discovery of criticism;--it is a necessity of the
human mind; and all nations have felt and obeyed it, in the invention of
metre, and measured sounds, as the vehicle and 'involucrum' of
poetry--itself a fellow-growth from the same life,--even as the bark is
to the tree!

No work of true genius dares want its appropriate form, neither indeed
is there any danger of this. As it must not, so genius cannot, be
lawless; for it is even this that constitutes it genius--the power of
acting creatively under laws of its own origination. How then comes it
that not only single 'Zoili', but whole nations have combined in
unhesitating condemnation of our great dramatist, as a sort of African
nature, rich in beautiful monsters,--as a wild heath where islands of
fertility look the greener from the surrounding waste, where the
loveliest plants now shine out among unsightly weeds, and now are choked
by their parasitic growth, so intertwined that we cannot disentangle the
weed without snapping the flower?--In this statement. I have had no
reference to the vulgar abuse of Voltaire [1], save as far as his
charges are coincident with the decisions of Shakspeare's own
commentators and (so they would tell you) almost idolatrous admirers.
The true ground of the mistake lies in the confounding mechanical
regularity with organic form. The form is mechanic, when on any given
material we impress a pre-determined form, not necessarily arising out