Some hungers are quite satisfied by taking in
what others have thought and felt and done. By the assimilation of this
food many minds grow and prosper; but other minds feed far more upon
what rises from their own depths; in the answers they are compelled to
provide to the questions that come unsought; in the theories they cannot
help constructing for the inclusion in one whole of the various facts
around them, which seem at first sight to strive with each other like
the atoms of a chaos; in the examination of those impulses of hidden
origin which at one time indicate a height of being far above the
thinker's present condition, at another a gulf of evil into which he may
possibly fall. But in Shakspere the two powers of beholding and
originating meet like the rejoining halves of a sphere. A man who thinks
his own thoughts much, will often walk through London streets and see
nothing. In the man who observes only, every passing object mirrors
itself in its prominent peculiarities, having a kind of harmony with all
the rest, but arouses no magician from the inner chamber to charm and
chain its image to his purpose. In Shakspere, on the contrary, every
outer form of humanity and nature spoke to that ever-moving,
self-vindicating--we had almost said, and in a sense it would be true,
self-generating--humanity within him.
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