Shakspeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd.  He is inconceivably wise; the others, conceivably.  A good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain and think from thence; but not into Shakspeare’s.  We are still out of doors.  For executive faculty, for creation, Shakspeare is unique.  No man can imagine it better.  He was the farthest reach of subtlety compatible with an individual self,—­the subtilest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship.  With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power.  He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments as if they were people who had lived under his roof; and few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions.  And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit.  Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string.  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.  This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations.  Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur:  he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently and without any distortion or favor.  He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.

In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent.  He had the power to make one picture.  Daguerre learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million.  There are always objects; but there was never representation.  Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits.  No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated.