The forms of poetry have only the rhythmic analogy, as forms, to those of music; but in their foundation in the same Nature, and in their manner of development, there is a closer resemblance.  Both in music and poetry, the older artists regarded with most strictness the carrying through of the whole; they cared little for the taking tunes or the striking passages; they looked with eyes single to their ultimate purposes.  Shakspeare came, and accomplished at once, for dramatic art, what the fathers of modern music began for their art nearly a century later.  He made the strict form yield to and take new shape from natural feeling.  This feeling, whose expression is the musical element of poetry, he brought up to its proper relation with all the other qualities.  Look at the terrific bombast which preceded him,—­the mighty efforts of mighty men to draw music or the power of sound into their art; Hieronymo is like some portentous convulsion of Nature,—­the upheaval of a new geological era.  The writers felt that there must be style suited to passion, and that they must attain it,—­but how?  By artificial pomp?—­or by yielding with artful reserve to the natural eloquence of passion?

Shakspeare has answered the question for all time; and he uses both, each in its proper place.  Nothing, even in music, ever showed an art growing out of a nicer sensibility in sound than his variety and appropriateness in style.  For an art it is, and we cannot make a definition of that word which shall include other forms of art and not include it.  If the passion and the feeling make the style, it is the poet’s art that leaves them free to do it; he superintends; he feigns that which he leaves to make; he shares his art with “great creating Nature.”  All is unreal; all comes out of him; and all that has to do with the form and expression of his products is, of course, included in the manifest when his ship of fancy gets its clearance at the custom-house of his judgment.  The style he assumes cannot but be present to his consciousness in the progress of a long drama.  He must perceive, as he writes, if he has the common penetration of humanity, that the flow and cadence of his “Henry the Eighth” are not like those of his “Midsummer Night’s Dream”; and he must preserve his tone, with, at times, direct art, not leaving everything to the feeling.  That he does so is as evident as if he had chosen a form of verse more remote from the language of Nature and obliged himself to conform to its requirements.  The terrible cursing of Margaret in “Richard III.,” for example, is not the remorseless, hollow monotony of it, while it so heightens the passion, as evident to Shakspeare as to us; or had he no ear for verse, and just let his words sound on as they would, looking only at the meaning, and counting his iambics on his fingers,—­not too carefully either?  If the last supposition is to be insisted on, we must confine our notions of his perceptions and powers within very ordinary bounds, and make dramatic art as unpoetic as the art of brickmaking.