dramatic perfection elevates into the ideal, and the richest fancy touches with poetical repose, will awaken in your mind a softened solemnity of feeling, like that under whose sway we have both wandered in the mountainous forests which skirt our native river; the continuous and gloomy canopy of the gigantic pines hanging over-head like a dungeon roof, while the green sward which was the pavement of the woodland temple, and the lines of natural columns which bounded its retiring avenues, were flooded with the glad illumination of the descending sunset. [Sidenote: the anxious searcher into truth, is yet the happiest creator of beauty: the 'maker' of Ric. III. and Iago as well as Juliet and Titania; of Macbeth as well as Hamlet.] We reflect with wonder that the most anxious of all poetical inquirers into truth, is also the most powerful painter of unearthly horrors, and the most felicitous creator of romantic or imaginary beauty; that the poet of Richard and Iago is also the poet of Juliet, of Ariel, and of Titania; that the fearfully real self-torture, the judicially inflicted remorse, of Macbeth, is set in contrast with the wildest figures which superstitious imagination ever conceived; that on the same canvas on which Hamlet stands as a personification of the Reason of man shaken by the assaults of evil within him and without, the gates of the grave are visibly opened, and the dead ascend to utter strange secrets in the ear of night. [Sidenote: His faculties early expanded consistently, and workt thro' all his life actively.] But even this union is less extraordinary than the regular and unparalleled consistency with which the poet's faculties early expanded themselves, and the full activity with which through life all continued to work. [Sidenote: Homer ebbd,] Even the dramatic soul of Homer ebbed like the sea, sinking in old age into the substitution of wild and minutely told adventure for the historical portraiture of mental grandeur and passionate strength. [Sidenote: Milton sank poetry in polemics.] The youth of Milton brooded over the love and loveliness of external nature; it was not till his maturity of years that he soared into the empyrean or descended sheer into the secrets of the abyss; and [106:1]advancing age brought weakness with it, and quenched in the morass of polemical disputation the torch which had flamed with sacred light. [Sidenote: Shakspere alone flowd full tide on.] [Sidenote: Experience came soon to him; Fancy abode with him to the end.] Shakspeare alone was the same from youth to age; in youth no imperfection, in age no mortality or decay; he performed in his early years every department of the task which he had to perform, and he laboured in it with unexhausted and uncrippled energies till the bowl was broken at the fountain; experience visited him early, fancy lingered with him to the last; the rapid developement of his powers was an indication of the internal strength of his genius; their steady