for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter.  It almost takes one’s breath away to think that “Hamlet” and the “Novum Organon” were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time.  But Ben was right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards.  He lived long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure traditionary and conventional.  It was becoming so, partly from the necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and exhausted,—­but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase.  Dante, among modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, “Optimis conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et ingenio versificantur."[9]

Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to get at an original soul.  He had as much confidence in his homebred speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,—­

  “Not marble nor the gilded monuments
  Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and perpetuator of it.  As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he would do so a fortiori in his plays, both for the purpose of immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation.  Clear thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate intentionally in others.  The difficult passages in the plays, then, are to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at a clearer theory and better understanding of it.

While we believe that our language had two periods of culmination in poetic beauty,—­one of nature, simplicity, and truth, in the ballads, which deal only with narrative and feeling,—­another of Art, (or Nature as it is ideally reproduced through the imagination,) of stately amplitude, of passionate intensity and elevation, in Spenser and the greater dramatists,—­and that Shakspeare made use of the latter as he found it, we by no means intend to say that he did not enrich it, or that any inferior man could have dipped the same words out of the great poet’s inkstand.  But he enriched it only by the natural expansion and exhilaration of which it was conscious, in yielding to the mastery of a genius that could turn and wind it like a fiery Pegasus, making it feel its life in every limb.  He enriched it through that exquisite sense of music, (never approached but by Marlowe,) to which it seemed to be eagerly obedient, as if every word said to him,