fastens them in the chamber of his imagination until his distant purpose is accomplished, and he has found a language for them which the world will understand.  And this is where Shakspeare’s art is so noble,—­in that he conquers the entire universe of thought, sentiment, feeling, and passion,—­goes into the whole and takes up and portrays characters the most extreme and diverse, passions the most wild, sentiment the most refined, feelings the most delicate,—­and does this by an art in which he must make his characters appear real and we looking on, though he cannot use, to develop his dramas, a hundred-thousandth part of the words that would be used in real life,—­that is, in Nature.  He also always approaches us upon the level of our common sense and experience, and never requires us to yield it,—­never breaks in or jars upon our judgment, or shocks or alarms any natural sensibility.  After enlarging our souls with the stir of whatever can move us through poetry, he leaves us where he found us, refreshed by new thoughts, new scenes, and new knowledge of ourselves and our kind, more capable, and, if we choose to be so, more wise.  His art is so great that we almost forget its presence,—­almost forget that the Macbeth and Othello we have seen and heard were Shakspeare’s, and that he MADE them; we can scarce conceive how he could feign as if felt, and retain and reproduce such a play of emotions and passions from the position of spectator, his own soul remaining, with its sovereign reason, and all its powers natural and acquired, far, far above all its creations,—­a spirit alone before its Maker.

The opening of “Timon” was selected on account of its artful preparation for and relation to what it precedes.  It shows the forethought and skill of its author in the construction or opening out of his play, both in respect to the story and the feeling; yet even here, in this half-declamatory prologue, the poet’s dramatic art is also evident.  His poet and painter are living men, and not mere utterers of so many words.  Was this from intuition?—­or because he found it easy to make them what he conceived them, and felt that it would add to the life of his introduction, though he should scarcely bring them forward afterwards?  No doubt the mind’s eye helps the mind in character-drawing, and that appropriate language springs almost uncalled to the pen, especially of a practised writer for the stage.  But is his scene a dream which he can direct, and which, though he knows it all proceeds from himself, yet seems to keep just in advance of him,—­his fancy shooting ahead and astonishing him with novelties in dialogue and situation?  There are those who have experienced this condition in sickness, and who have amused themselves with listening to a fancied conversation having reference to subjects of their own choosing, yet in which they did not seem to themselves to control the cause of the dialogue or originate the particular things said, until they could actually hear