talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear.  He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, and which he disposes all to exhibit.  He crams this part, and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength.  But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities:  no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no mannerist is he:  he has no discoverable egotism:  the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately.  He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other.  This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.

20.  This power of expression, or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes him the type of the poet, and has added a new problem to metaphysics.  This is that which throws him into natural history, as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations.  Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur; he could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass:  the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor.  He carried his powerful execution into minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope.

21.  In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent.  He had the power to make one picture.  Daguerre[644] learned how to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine; and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million.  There are always objects; but there was never representation.  Here is perfect representation, at last; and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits.  No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakspeare; but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated.

22.  His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece.  The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they:  and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece; like the tone of voice of some incomparable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause as unproducible now as a whole poem.

23.  Though the speeches in the plays, and single lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphuism,[645] yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning, and so linked with its foregoers and followers, that the logician is satisfied.  His means are as admirable as his ends; every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too.  He is not reduced to dismount and walk, because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction; he always rides.