by nobler reaches of language, by the influence at once inspiring and modulating of verse, by an intenser play of passion condensing that misty mixture of feeling and reflection which makes the ordinary atmosphere of existence into flashes of thought and phrase whose brief but terrible illumination prints the outworn landscape of every day upon our brains, with its little motives and mean results, in lines of telltale fire. The moral office of tragedy is to show us our own weaknesses idealized in grander figures and more awful results to teach us that what we pardon in ourselves as venial faults, if they seem to have but slight influence on our immediate fortunes, have arms as long as those of kings, and reach forward to the catastrophe of our lives; that they are dry-rotting the very fiber of will and conscience, so that, if we should be brought to the test of a great temptation or a stringent emergency, we must be involved in a ruin as sudden and complete as that we shudder at in the unreal scene of the theatre. But the primary object of a tragedy is not to inculcate a formal moral. Representing life, it teaches, like life, by indirection, by those nods and winks that are thrown away on us blind horses in such profusion. We may learn, to be sure, plenty of lessons from Shakespeare. We are not likely to have kingdoms to divide, crowns foretold us by weird sisters, a father's death to avenge, or to kill our wives from jealousy; but Lear may teach us to draw the line more clearly between a wise generosity and a loosehanded weakness of giving; Macbeth, how one sin involves another, and for ever another, by a fatal parthenogenesis, and that the key which unlocks forbidden doors to our will or passion leaves a stain on the hand, that may not be so dark as blood, but that will not out; Hamlet, that all the

noblest gifts of person, temperament, and mind slip like sand through the grasp of an infirm purpose; Othello, that the perpetual silt of some one weakness, the eddies of a suspicious temper depositing their one impalpable layer after another, may build up a shoal on which an heroic life and an otherwise magnanimous nature may bilge and go to pieces. All this we may learn, and much more, and Shakespeare was no doubt well aware of all this and more; but I do not believe that he wrote his plays with any such didactic purpose. He knew human nature too well not to know that one thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning-that, where one man shapes his life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have it shaped for them by impulse and by circumstances. He did not mean his great tragedies for scarecrows, as if the nailing of one hawk to the barn-door would prevent the next from coming down souse into the hen-yard. No, it is not the poor bleaching victim hung up to moult its draggled feathers in the rain that he wishes to show us. He loves the hawknature as well as the hen-nature; and, if he is unequaled in anything, it is in that sunny breadth of view, that impregnability of reason, that looks down all ranks and conditions of men, all fortune and misfortune, with the equal eye of the pure artist.

Whether I have fancied anything into Hamlet which the author never dreamed of putting there I do not greatly concern myself to inquire. Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in their works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in the brain as they are built up with deliberate forethought. Praise art as we will, that which the artist did not mean to put into his work, but

which found itself there by some generous process of nature of which he was as unaware as the blue river is of its rhyme with the blue sky, has somewhat in it that snatches us into sympathy with higher things than those which come by plot and observation. Goethe wrote his "Faust" in its earliest form without a thought of the deeper meaning which the exposition of an age of criticism was to find in it; without foremeaning it, he had impersonated in Mephistopheles the genius of his century. Shall this subtract from the debt we owe him? Not at all. If originality were conscious of itself, it would have lost its right to be original. I believe that Shakespeare intended to impersonate in Hamlet not a mere metaphysical entity, but a man of flesh and blood: yet it is certainly curious how prophetically typical the character is of that introversion of mind which is so constant a phenomenon of these latter days, of that over-consciousness which wastes itself in analyzing the motives of action instead of acting.

The old painters had a rule, that all compositions should be pyramidal in form-a central figure, from which the others slope gradually away on the two sides. Shakespeare probably had never heard of this rule, and, if he had, would not have been likely to respect it more than he has the socalled classical unities of time and place. But he understood perfectly the artistic advantages of gradation, contrast, and relief. Taking Hamlet as the key-note, we find in him weakness of character which, on the one hand, is contrasted with the feebleness that springs from overweening conceit in Polonius and with frailty of temperament in Ophelia, while, on the other hand, it is brought into fuller relief by the steady force of Horatio and the impulsive violence of Laertes,

who is resolute from thoughtlessness, just as Hamlet is irresolute from overplus of thought.

If we must draw a moral from Hamlet, it would seem to be that Will is Fate, and that, Will once abdicating, the inevitable successor in the regency is Chance. Had Hamlet acted, instead of musing how good it would be to act, the King might have been the only victim. As it is, all the main actors in the story are the fortuitous sacrifice of his irresolution. We see how a single great vice of character at last draws to itself as allies and confederates all other weaknesses of the man, as in civil wars the timid and the selfish wait to throw themselves upon the stronger side:

"In Life's small things be resolute and great

To keep thy muscles trained: know'st thou when Fate

Thy measure takes ? or when she'll say to thee,

'I find thee worthy, do this thing for me'?"

THE

MECHANISM OF VITAL ACTIONS.*

THE appearance of Professor Draper's ingenious and original treatise on "Physiology" must call the attention of a large class of readers to those higher questions of the science which are freely discussed in its pages. The scientific and literary character of the work has been made the subject of special notice in various other quarters. It is agreed that Professor Draper has given us a book that is full of interest, containing many striking views and novel experimental illustrations. Its faults spring out of its merits, and are such as belong to most works of science written by men of lively imagination. We make our sincere acknowledgments

*Published July, 1857.

1. Human Physiology, Statical and Dynamical; or the Conditions and Course of the Life of Man. By John William Draper, M. D., LL. D., Professor of Chemistry and Physiology in the University of New York. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1856. 8vo. Pp. 649.

2. The Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces. By William B. Carpenter, M. D., Examiner in Physiology and Comparative Anatomy in the University of London. From the "Philosophical Transactions," Part II., for 1850. London. 1850. 4to. Pp. 37.

3. The Correlation of Physical Forces. By W. R. Grove, M. A., F. R. S., Barrister-at-Law. Second edition. London. 1850. 8vo. Pp. 119.

4. Caloric; its Mechanical, Chemical, and Vital Agencies in the Phenomena of Nature. By Samuel L. Metcalfe, M. D., of Transylvania University. London. 1843. 2 vols. 8vo. Pp. 1,100.