of many things is manifestly imperfect, whose inaptitude for many things is apparent, can he be the creator of such glorious works?  Can he be the large and patient thinker, the delicate humourist, the impassioned poet?  Nature seems to have answered this question for us; yet so little are we inclined to accept Nature’s emphatic testimony on this point, that few of us ever see without disappointment the man whose works have revealed his greatness.

It stands to reason that we should not rightly appreciate Shakspeare if we were to meet him simply because we should meet him as an ordinary man, and not as the author of Hamlet.  Yet if we had a keen insight we should detect even in his quiet talk the marks of an original mind.  We could not, of course, divine, without evidence, how deep and clear his insight, how mighty his power over grand representative symbols, how prodigal his genius:  these only could appear on adequate occasions.  But we should notice that he had an independent way of looking at things.  He would constantly bring before us some latent fact, some unsuspected relation, some resemblance between dissimilar things.  We should feel that his utterances were not echoes.  If therefore, in these moments of equable serenity, his mind glancing over trivial things saw them with great clearness, we might infer that in moments of intense activity his mind gazing steadfastly on important things, would see wonderful visions, where to us all was vague and shifting.  During our quiet walk with him across the fields he said little, or little that was memorable; but his eye was taking in the varying forms and relations of objects, and slowly feeding his mind with images.  The common hedge-row, the gurgling brook, the waving corn, the shifting cloud-architecture, and the sloping uplands, have been seen by us a thousand times, but they show us nothing new; they have been seen by him a thousand times, and each time with fresh interest, and fresh discovery.  If he describe that walk he will surprise us with revelations:  we can then and thereafter see all that he points out; but we needed his vision to direct our own.  And it is one of the incalculable influences of poetry that each new revelation is an education of the eye and the feelings.  We learn to see and feel Nature in a far clearer and profounder way, now that we have been taught to look by poets.  The incurious unimpassioned gaze of the Alpine peasant on the scenes which mysteriously and profoundly affect the cultivated tourist, is the gaze of one who has never been taught to look.  The greater sensibility of educated Europeans to influences which left even the poetic Greeks unmoved, is due to the directing vision of successive poets.