So far from the position holding true, that great wit (or genius, in our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found to be the sanest writers.  It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakspeare.  The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties.  Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.  “So strong a wit,” says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,

“—­did Nature to him frame, As all things but his judgment overcame, His judgment like the heavenly moon did show, Tempering that mighty sea below.”

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet.  But the true poet dreams being awake.  He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.  In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths.  He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated.  He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos “and old night.”  Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a “human mind untuned,” he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon, neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,—­never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so,—­he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels, or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions.  Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.  From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her consistency.  He is beautifully loyal to that sovereign directress, even when he appears most to betray and desert her.  His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Proteus.  He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wonder at themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to European vesture.  Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth.  Herein the great and the little wits are differenced; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence, they lose themselves, and their readers.  Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares.  They do not create, which implies shaping and consistency.  Their imaginations are not active—­for to be active is to call something into act and form—­but passive, as men in sick dreams.  For the super-natural,