These proceed from imagination and affection, and abate somewhat of the angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and surfaces become transparent, and are no longer seen; causes and spirits are seen through them. The best, the happiest moments of life, are these delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the reverential withdrawing of Nature before its God.

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. I. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a hint from Nature herself.

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky. The least change in our point of view, gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a coach, and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show. The men, the women,-talking, running, bartering, fighting, the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, are unrealised at once, or, at least, wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substan

D

tial beings. What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar in the rapid movement of the railroad-car! Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight change in the point of vision,) please us most. In a camera-obscura, the butcher's cart, and the figure of one of our own family, amuse us. So, a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

Turn the

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle,-between man and Nature. Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised that, whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

2. In a higher manner, the poet communicates the same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, the hero, the maiden,-not different from what we know them, but only lifted from the ground, and afloat before the eye. He unfixes the land and the sea, makes them revolve around

the axis of his primary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed himself by an heroic passion, he uses matter as symbols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems Nature as rooted and fast; the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexible; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and makes them the words of the Reason. The imagination may be defined to be, the use which the Reason makes of the material world. Shakspeare possesses the power of subordinating Nature for the purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His imperial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from hand to hand, to embody any capricious shade of thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remotest spaces of Nature are visited, and the farthest sundered things are brought together by a subtile spiritual connection. We are made aware that magnitude of material things is merely relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his Sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament;

The ornament of beauty is Suspect,

A crow which flies in heaven's sweetest air.

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, as he speaks, to a city, or a state.

No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the brow of thralling discontent;
It fears not policy, that heretic,

That works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic.

In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids seem to him recent and transitory; and the freshness of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance to morning.

Take those lips away

Which so sweetly were foresworn ;
And those eyes,-the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.

The wild beauty of this hyperbole, I may say, in passing, it would not be easy to match in literature.

This transfiguration which all material objects undergo through the passion of the poet,-this power which he exerts, at any moment, to magnify the small, to micrify the great,-might be illustrated by a thousand examples from his

Plays.

I have before me the "Tempest," and

will cite only these few lines:

ARIEL. The strong-based promontory

Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up
The pine and cedar.

Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic Alonzo and his companions:

Again :

A solemn air, and the best comforter
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,
Now useless, boiled within thy skull.

The charm dissolves apace;
And, as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.

Their understanding

Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores

That now lie foul and muddy.

The perception of real affinities between events (that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are real), enables the poet thus to make free with the most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, and to assert the predominance of the soul.