the most marked feature of his character, and which he could want without losing the essential portion of his identity. [Sidenote: No.] [Sidenote: We could give up Miranda, Ariel, Juliet, Romeo, and yet leave the true, the highest Shakspere behind, in Richard, Macbeth, Lear, Hamlet.] We could conceive, (although the idea is sacrilege to the genius and the altar of poetry,) we could conceive that 'The Tempest' had remained unwritten, that Miranda had not made inexperience beautiful by the spell of innocence and youth, that the hideous slave Caliban had never scowled and cursed, nor Ariel alighted on the world like a shooting-star,--we could dismiss alike from our memories the moon-light forest in which the Fairy Court revel, and the lurid and spectre-peopled ghastliness of the cave of Hecate,--we could in fancy remove from the gallery of the poet's art the picture which exhibits the two self-destroyed lovers lying side by side in the tomb of the Capulets,--and we could discard from our minds, and hold as never having been invented by the poet, all which we find in his works possessing a character similar to these scenes and figures;--and yet we should leave behind that which would support Shakspeare as having pursued the highest ends of his art, and as having attained those ends more fully than any other who ever followed them: Richard would still be his; Macbeth would think and tremble, and Lear weep and be mad; and Hamlet would still pore over the riddle of life, and find in death the solution of its mystery. [Sidenote: These show his Imagination, the force with which he throws himself into their characters.] If it is to such characters as these last that we refer when we speak of the poet's power of imagina[94:1]tion, and if we wish to designate by the word the force with which he throws himself into the conception of those characters, then we apprehend truly what the sphere is in which his greatness lies, although we either describe the whole of a most complicated mental process by naming a single step of it, or load the name of that one mental act with a weight of meaning which it is unfit to bear. [Sidenote: Shakspere's supremacy lies in his characterization.]