An omnipresent humanity
co-ordinates 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.
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.
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