May 12. 1830.

SHAKSPEARE.-MILTON.-HOMER.

SHAKSPEARE is the Spinozistic deity-an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out. No one can understand Shakspeare's superiority fully until he has ascertained, by comparison, all that which he possessed in common with several other great dramatists of his age, and has then calculated the surplus which is entirely Shakspeare's own. His rhythm is so perfect, that you may be almost sure that you do not

understand the real force of a line, if it does not run well as you read it. The necessary mental pause after every hemistich or imperfect line is always equal to the time that would have been taken in reading the complete verse.

I have no doubt that instead of

the twinn'd stones

Upon the number'd beach

in Cymbeline *, it ought to be read thus : —

the grimed stones

Upon the umber'd beach.

So, in Henry V. †, instead of

His mountain (or mounting) sire on mountains standing

it ought to be read" his monarch sire,”— that is, Edward the Third.

I have no doubt whatever that Homer is a mere concrete name for the rhapsodies of the Iliad. Of course there was a Homer,

* Act i. sc. 7.

† Act ii. sc. 4.

Mr. Coleridge was a decided Wolfian in the Ho

and twenty besides. I will engage to compile twelve books with characters just as distinct and consistent as those in the Iliad, from the metrical ballads, and other chronicles of England, about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I say nothing about moral dignity, but the mere consistency of character. The different qualities were traditional. Tristram is always courteous, Lancelot invincible, and so on. The same might be done with the Spanish romances of the Cid. There is no subjectivity whatever in the Homeric poetry. There is a subjectivity of the poet, as of Milton, who is himself before himself in every thing he writes; and there is a subjectivity of the

meric question, but he had never read a word of the famous Prolegomena, and knew nothing of Wolf's reasoning, but what I told him of it in conversation. Mr. C. informed me, that he adopted the conclusion contained in the text upon the first perusal of Vico's Scienza Nuova; cr not," he said, "that Vico has reasoned it out with such learning and accuracy as you report of Wolf, but Vico struck out all the leading hints, and I soon filled up the rest out of my own head." ED.

persona, or dramatic character, as in all Shakspeare's great creations, Hamlet, Lear,

&c.

May 14. 1830.

REASON AND UNDERSTANDING.-WORDS AND NAMES OF THINGS.

UNTIL you have mastered the fundamental difference, in kind, between the reason and the understanding as faculties of the human mind, you cannot escape a thousand difficulties in philosophy. It is pre-eminently the

Gradus ad Philosophiam.

The general harmony between the operations of the mind and heart, and the words which express them in almost all languages, is wonderful; whilst the endless discrepancies between the names of things is very well deserving notice. There are nearly a hundred names in the different German dialects for the alder-tree. I believe many more

remarkable instances are to be found in Arabic. Indeed, you may take a very preg nant and useful distinction between words and mere arbitrary names of things.

May 15. 1830.

THE TRINITY. - IRVING.

THE Trinity is, 1. the Will; 2. the Reason, or Word; 3. the Love, or Life. As we distinguish these three, so we must unite them in one God. The union must be as transcendant as the distinction.

Mr. Irving's notion is tritheism, nay, rather in terms, tri-dæmonism. His opinion about the sinfulness of the humanity of our Lord is absurd, if considered in one point of view; for body is not carcase. How can there be a sinful carcase? But what he says is capable of a sounder interpretation. Irving caught many things from me; but he would never attend to any thing which he thought