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SO far from the position holding true, that great wit (enius, in our modern way of speaking), has a necessary alliah insanity, the greatest wits, on the trary, will ever be found to he the sa writers. It is impossible for the mind to ceive of a mad Shakspeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to he uood, mas itself in the admirable balance of all the faculties. Madness is the disproportioraining or excess of any one of them. "S a wit," says Cowley, speaking of a poetical friend,"----did Nature to him frame, As all things but his judgment overcame,
His judgment like the heavenly moon did show,
Tempering that mighty sea below."
The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a dition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominio. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He asds the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night." Or if; abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is tent awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timoher is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that,never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so, -- he has his better genius still whispering at his ear, with the good serva suggesting saner sels, or with the ho steward Flavius reending kindlier resolutions. Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will he found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her sistency. He is beautifully loyal to that sn directress, even when he appears most to betray a her. His ideal tribes submit to policy; his very monsters are tamed to his hand, even as that wild sea-brood, shepherded by Prot?99lｉb?eus. He tames, and he clothes them with attributes of flesh and blood, till they wo themselves, like Indian Islanders forced to submit to Europeaure. Caliban, the Witches, are as true to the laws of their own nature (ours with a difference), as Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth. Herein the great and the little wits are differehat if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existehey lose themselves, and their readers. Their phantoms are lawless; their visions nightmares. They do not create, which implies shaping and sistency. Their imaginations are not active -- for to be active is to call something into ad form -- but passive, as men in sick dreams. For the super-natural, or something super-added to what we know of nature, they give you the plainly non-natural. And if this were all, and that these mental halluations were discoverable only ireatment of subjects out of nature, or transding it, the judgment might with some plea be pardoned if it ran riot, and a little wantonized: but even in the describing of real and every day life, that which is before their eyes, one of these lesser wits shall more deviate from nature -- show more of that insequence, which has a natural alliah frenzy, than a great genius in his "maddest fits," as Withers somewhere calls them. eal to any ohat is acquainted with the on run of Lanes novels, -- as they existed some twenty or thirty years back, -- those sty intellectual viands of the whole female reading public, till a happier genius arose, and expelled for ever the innutritious phantoms, -- whether he has not found his brain more "betossed," his memory more puzzled, his sense of when and where more founded, among the improbable events, the i is, the insistent characters, or no-characters, of some third-rate love intrigue where the persons shall be a Llendamour and a Miss Rivers, and the se only alterween Bath and Bond-streets more bewildering dreaminess induced upon him, than he has felt wandering over all the fairy grounds of Spenser. In the produs we refer to, nothing but names and places is familiar; the persons are her of this world ..nor of any other ceivable one; an endless string of activities without purpose, of purposes destitute of motive : -- we meet phantoms in our known walks; fantasy only christened. In the poet we have names whinounce fi; and we have absolutely no place at all, for the things and persons of the Fairy Queen prate not of their "whereabout." But in their inner nature, and the law of their speed as, we are at home and upon acquainted ground. The ourns life into a dream; the other to the wildest dreams gives the sobrieties of every day occurrences. By what subtile art of trag the mental processes it is effected, we are not philosophers enough to explain, but in that wonderful episode of the cave of Mammon, in which the Money God appears first in the lowest form of a miser, is then a worker of metals, and bees the god of all the treasures of the world; and has a daughter, Ambition, before whom all the world kneels for favours -- with the Hesperian fruit, the waters of Tantalus, with Pilate washing his hands vainly, but not impertily, in the same stream -- that we should be at one mome<cite>.9９lib?</cite>nt in the cave of an old hoarder of treasures, at the at the fe of the Cyclops, in a palad yet in hell, all at once, with the shifting mutations of the most rambling dream, and our judgme all the time awake, aher able nor willing to detect the fallacy, is a proof of that hidden sanity which still guides the poet in his widest seeming. aberrations.
It is not enough to say that the whole episode is a copy of the minds ceptions in sleep; it is, in some sort -- but what a copy! Let the most romantic of us, that has beeertained all night with the spectacle of some wild and magnifit vision, rebi in the m, and try it by his waking judgment. That which appeared so shifting, a so coherent, while that faculty assive, when it es under cool examination, shall appear so reasonless and so unlihat we are ashamed to have been so deluded; and to have taken, though but in sleep, a monster fod. But the transitions in this episode are every whit as violent as in the most extravagant dream, ahe waking judgment ratifies them.
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