of resistance, yields flexibly to all its natural movements, presenting that higher phenomenon which genius and revelation were meant to forward in all men,-conscious nature.

Our view is not concerned, therefore, with those necessary motives which doubtless compelled Shakspeare, like all of us, to provide a daily means of support. These are matters of external history. They are indeed prominent objects, often changing and giving a new direction to the current; but they tell us not why it flows onward and will ever flow. It is not to the softer and more perishable parts of his massy mind, I would direct my attention; but to those veins of a primitive formation, which, now that time has loosened and removed all else, still stand out as the iron frame work of his being. We look upon such minds as Shakspeare's as exceptions, for wise purposes, to our common nature; and as the single man who is born blind tells thousands that there is one who giveth them sight; so those of our race, who by nature are so strongly prompted to will and to do that their minds seem almost as passive as matter beneath superior power, have been denied the liberty of will, as I think, that the many might be continually reminded that their minds were not their own, and that the conscious submission of their wills to the same great influence was their highest glory. All men will then exhibit, according to their

gifts, that greatness and universality as conscious, which we now witness in them unconsciously shown; their ruling motive will be a yielding to the hallowed impulses to action; the permanent state of their souls, eternal life.

There is a desire of mental activity felt by such a mind as Shakspeare's corresponding with that impulse to physical action felt by all men. This must be a natural consequence of such mental endowment; and the movements of the mind, in men like these, must as regularly take the lead of volition as the involuntary motions of the physical frame. Scott's confession on this point applies equally to all. "People may say this and that of the pleasure of fame or of profit as a motive of writing: I think the only pleasure is in the actual exertion and research, and I would no more write upon any other terms than I would hunt merely to dine upon hare-soup. At the same time, if credit and profit came unlooked for, I would no more quarrel with them than with the soup." The main action of all such minds must evidently be as independent of the will as is the life in a plant or a tree; and, as they are but different results of the same great vital energy in nature, we cannot but feel that the works of genius are as much a growth as are the productions of the material world. Such minds act as if all else but the sense of their existence was an accident; and, under the

influence of this transforming power, all is plastic ;marble becomes flexible and shapes itself into life; words partake as it were of motion, form and speech; and matter, like the atoms on the magnetic plate, feels instinct with order and design. The stream of life, which, in other men, obstructed and at last stationary as the objects that surround it, seems scarcely to deserve the name,—in them rolls ever onward its rich and life-giving waters as if unconscious of the beautiful banks it has overflowed with fertility. With most men it requires a continual effort of the will to prevent the objects which were only intended to give exercise to their souls from detaining them, as it were, and holding them in a torpid inanimation. As long as man labors for a physical existence, though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural; it is life, though that of this world, for which he instinctively works. But when he has reached this point where the means of physical existence are secured, he is permitted to become unnatural; he is left at liberty to strive for that eternal life which is promised him, by the voluntary surrender and sacrifice of the objects of this; or to become at every moment more like the senseless clods around him, and, at last, when he has gained the whole world, instead of having sacrificed it all to that sense of life and love within him, he has lost his soul. It seems indeed a thing impossible to us, sunk as we are

in sin and the flesh, that this vast globe and millions of others should roll on their limitless ways with the speed of thought, moved but by a will kindred with our own. But would we take our just position in regard to the objects of sense; and, instead of finding ourselves revolving around them, did they seem like harmonized spheres enlightened and moved by the strong working principles of duty and love within us, we should then indeed feel of a truth our relationship to our Father, and that for matter to obey His will was but its natural law. Do we wonder then, that, as this momentary petrifaction of the heart goes on, we are every day more and more strangers in this world of love, holding no communion with the Universal Parent, and hoarding up instead of distributing His general gifts? As we resist this process, the resulting state must evidently be one with which we may interpret the mind of Shakspeare, a sense of eternal life, an activity communicated to all else, and not merely one communicated to us from without; we are no longer the servants of sin, but the free followers of Christ.

As, therefore, the activity of the mind, freed by an exertion of the will, must ever be connected with the sense of eternal life, so is there joined with the mind's involuntary freedom a sense of existence that constitutes its innocent happiness, and makes it the natural teacher to us of the wide principle which

is its mission. In Claudio's reflections on death, the poet unconsciously lays bare the texture of his own mind. Claudio regrets not, as we should suppose he would, the loss of his sister, or the good things of this world, nor feels a doubt of another; but all his horrors are but the negations of these two great characteristics of Shakspeare's own mind, -the barring up of his varied activity, and the losing in a kneaded clod of the sensible warm motion of life.

“Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts
Imagine howling!-'tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life,
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death.”

And again, in Clarence's dream of death, so strongly is the resistance of the soul to this imprisoning of it