most, it is but the focal point of its fierce, or gentle, affectionate, or timorous character,—­the character of the species, But in man, neither gentleness nor fierceness can be more than as relative conditions,—­the outward moods of his unseen spirit; while the spirit itself, that daily and hourly sends forth its good and evil, to take shape from the body, still sits in darkness.  Yet have we that which can surely reach it; even our own spirit.  By this it is that we can enter into another’s soul, sound its very depths, and bring up his dark thoughts, nay, place them before him till he starts at himself; and more,—­it is by this we know that even the tangible, audible, visible world is not more real than a spiritual intercourse.  And yet without the physical organ who can hold it?  We can never indeed understand, but we may not doubt, that which has its power of proof in a single act of consciousness.  Nay, we may add that we cannot even conceive of a soul without a correlative form,—­though it be in the abstract; and vice versa.

For, among the many impossibilities, it is not the least to look upon a living human form as a thing; in its pictured copies, as already shown in a former discourse, it may be a thing, and a beautiful thing; but the moment we conceive of it as living, if it show not a soul, we give it one by a moral necessity; and according to the outward will be the spirit with which we endow it.  No poetic being, supposed of our species, ever lived to the imagination without some indication of the moral; it is the breath of its life:  and this is also true in the converse; if there be but a hint of it, it will instantly clothe itself in a human shape; for the mind cannot separate them.  In the whole range of the poetic creations of the great master of truth,—­we need hardly say Shakspeare,—­not an instance can be found where this condition of life is ever wanting; his men and women all have souls.  So, too, when he peoples the air, though he describe no form, he never leaves these creatures of the brain without a shape, for he will sometimes, by a single touch of the moral, enable us to supply one.  Of this we have a striking instance in one of his most unsubstantial creations, the “delicate Ariel.”  Not an allusion to its shape or figure is made throughout the play; yet we assign it a form on its very first entrance, as soon as Prospero speaks of its refusing to comply with the” abhorred commands” of the witch, Sycorax.  And again, in the fifth act, when Ariel, after recounting the sufferings of the wretched usurper and his followers, gently adds,—­

          “Your charm so strongly works them,
  That, if you now beheld them, your affections
  Would become tender.”

On which Prospero remarks,—­

  “Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
  Of their afflictions?”

Now, whether Shakspeare intended it or not, it is not possible after this for the reader to think of Ariel but in a human form; for slight as these hints are, if they do not indicate the moral affections, they at least imply something akin to them, which in a manner compels us to invest the gentle Spirit with a general likeness to our own physical exterior, though, perhaps, as indistinct as the emotion that called for it.