the voices rising from an indistinct whisper to plain speech.  I knew an instance, (which at least is not related in the very curious work of M. Boismont on the “Natural History of Hallucinations,”) where an invalid, recovering from illness, could hear for half a night the debates and doings of an imaginary association in the next chamber, the absurdity of which often made him laugh so that he could with difficulty keep quiet enough to listen; while occasionally extracts would be read from books written in a style whose precision and eloquence excited his admiration, or whose affecting solemnity moved him deeply, though he knew perfectly well that the whole came from his own brain.  This he could either cause or permit, and could in an instant change the subject of the conversation or command it into silence.  He would sometimes throw his pillow against the wall and say, “Be still!  I’ll hear no more till daybreak!” And this has taken place when he was in calm health in mind, and, except weakness, in body, and broad awake.  What was singular, the voices would cease at his bidding, and in one instance (which might have startled him, had he not known how common it is for persons to wake at an hour they fix) they awoke him at the time appointed.  Their language would bear the ordinary tests of sanity, and was like that we see in daily newspapers; but the various knowledge brought in, the complicated scenes gone through, made the whole resemble intricate concerted music, from the imperfect study of which possibly came the power to fabricate them.  That they were owing to some physical cause was shown by their keeping a sort of cadence with the pulse, and in the fact, that, though not disagreeable, they were wearisome; especially as they always appeared to be got up with some remote reference to the private faults and virtues of that tedious individual who is always forcing his acquaintance upon us, avoid him however we may,—­one’s self.

Shall we suppose that Shakspeare wrote in such an opium dream as this?  Did his “wood-notes wild” come from him as tunes do from a barrel-organ, where it is necessary only to set the machine and disturb the bowels of it by turning?  Was it sufficient for him to fore-plan the plots of his plays, the story, acts, scenes, persons,—­the general rough idea, or argument,—­and then to sit at his table, and, by some process analogous to mesmeric manipulations, put himself into a condition in which his genius should elaborate and shape what he, by the aid of his poetic taste and all other faculties, had been able to rough-hew?  How far did his consciousness desert him?—­only partially, as in the instance just given, so that he marvelled, while he wrote, at his own fertility, power, and truth?—­or wholly, as in a Pythonic inspiration, so that the frenzy filled him to his fingers’ ends, and he wrote, he knew not what, until he re-read it in his ordinary state?  In fine, was he the mere conduit of a divinity within him?—­or was he in his very self, in the nobility and true greatness of his being and the infinitude of his faculties, a living fountain,—­he, he alone, in as plain and common a sense as we mean when we say “a man,” the divinity?