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and Pollok's in our own language, we will only say, that they are as much wanting in the spirit of an epic as in its true form, and that they are as remote from the merit of Dante, whom they have taken as their model, as near him in plan. Their poems resemble those Spanish epics which suddenly appeared in the reign of Philip the Second, the whole series of which were nothing but chronicles, and differed but little from histories. Of Wilkie, and a

host of others, we might say as Giraldi Cinto said of Trissino, who employed twenty years on his "Italia Liberata," that they do but select the refuse from the gold of Homer, imitate his vices, and gather together all that which good judges would wish to be rid of, by which they show little wisdom.

We have thus endeavored to show the inability of the human mind, at the present day, to represent objectively its own action on another mind, and that the power to do this could alone enable the poet to embody in his hero the present development of the heroic character, and give to his poem a universal interest. We rejoice at this inability; it is the high privilege of our age, the greatest proof of the progress of the soul, and of its approach to that state of being where its thought is action, its word power.

SHAKSPEARE.

pleasing to frequent the places from which the feet of those whom this world calls great have passed away, to see the same groves and streams that they saw, to hear the same sabbath bells, to linger beneath the roof under which they lived, and be shaded by the same tree which shaded them. It is pleasant, for it makes us, as it were, companions of their earthly presence; the same heaven is above us, and the same earth is beneath us, and we feel ourselves sharers, for a time, in the same earthly heritage. But for the soul this is not enough. We feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even with that greatness which made the spots on which it rested hallowed; and until, by our own lives, and by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed us, we feel that union and relationship of the spirit which we seek. We may frequent the same shades,

we may linger beside the same streams, the mind may be raised and improved by its intercourse with a superior mind, but we can never be at rest, at home with them, we can never really see the same heaven and the same earth, either that our fellow men or that the Father of our spirits beholds, until by our own life that perfect union and relationship has been consummated. With other writers, at our very first acquaintance with their thoughts, we recognise our relationship with the swiftness of intuition; but who of us, however familiar he may have been with his writings, has yet caught a glance of Shakspeare's self, so that he could in any way identify himself with him, and feel himself a sharer in his joys and sorrows, his motives and his life? With views narrowed down to our own peculiar and selfish ends, we cannot well conceive, for we feel little within us that answers to a being like him whose spirit seemed the antagonist of matter; whose life was as various and all-embracing as nature's; and in whom the individual seemed lost and blended with the universal. In him we have a gift not of a world of matter but one of mind; a spirit to whom time and place seemed not to adhere; to whom all seasons were congenial; the world a home; who was related to us all in that which is most ourselves; and whose life and character, the more we lay aside what in us is provincial and selfish, the more deeply

shall we understand.

In speaking of him and what

he did as an exception to ordinary rules, we only confess our ignorance of the great law of his existence. If he was natural, and by a common nature kindred with us, as we all confess, that ignorance, which only exists by our own sufferance, will clear up, as we lay aside all that is false and artificial in our characters, and Shakspeare and his creations will stand before us in the clear bright sun-light of our own consciousness.

My object is to show, by an analysis of the character of Shakspeare, that a desire of action was the ruling impulse of his mind; and consequently a sense of existence its permanent state. That this condition was natural; not the result felt from a submission of the will to it, but bearing the will along with it; presenting the mind as phenomenal and unconscious, and almost as much a passive instrument as the material world.

I shall thus be led to find excuse for much that has seemed impure in his writings, and to change that admiration which has hitherto regarded him as a man, into one which would look upon him and love him as the unconscious work of God.

By doing this I shall show that there is a higher action than that we witness in him; where the will has not been borne down and drawn along by the mind's own original impulse; but, though capable

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