of the properties of the material;--as when to a mass of wet clay we
give whatever shape we wish it to retain when hardened. The organic
form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it developes, itself
from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with
the perfection of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the
form. Nature, the prime genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers,
is equally inexhaustible in forms;--each exterior is the physiognomy of
the being within,--its true image reflected and thrown out from the
concave mirror;--and even such is the appropriate excellence of her
chosen poet, of our own Shakspeare,--himself a nature humanized, a
genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit
wisdom deeper even than our consciousness.

I greatly dislike beauties and selections in general; but as proof
positive of his unrivalled excellence, I should like to try Shakspeare
by this criterion. Make out your amplest catalogue of all the human
faculties, as reason or the moral law, the will, the feeling of the
coincidence of the two (a feeling 'sui generis et demonstratio
clemontrationum') called the conscience, the understanding or prudence,
wit, fancy, imagination, judgment,--and then of the objects on which
these are to be employed, as the beauties, the terrors, and the seeming
caprices of nature, the realities and the capabilities, that is, the
actual and the ideal, of the human mind, conceived as an individual or
as a social being, as in innocence or in guilt, in a play-paradise, or
in a war-field of temptation;--and then compare with Shakspeare under
each of these heads all or any of the writers in prose and verse that
have ever lived! Who, that is competent to judge, doubts the
result?--And ask your own hearts,--ask your own common-sense--to
conceive the possibility of this man being--I say not, the drunken
savage of that wretched sciolist, whom Frenchmen, to their shame, have