Can HE be the large and patient thinker, the delicate humourist, the
impassioned poet? Nature seems to have answered this question for us;
yet so little are we inclined to accept Nature's emphatic testimony on
this point, that few of us ever see without disappointment the man
whose works have revealed his greatness.

It stands to reason that we should not rightly appreciate Shakspeare if
we were to meet him simply because we should meet him as an ordinary
man, and not as the author of HAMLET. Yet if we had a keen insight we
should detect even in his quiet talk the marks of an original mind. We
could not, of course, divine, without evidence, how deep and clear his
insight, how mighty his power over grand representative symbols, how
prodigal his genius: these only could appear on adequate occasions. But
we should notice that he had an independent way of looking at things.
He would constantly bring before us some latent fact, some unsuspected
relation, some resemblance between dissimilar things. We should feel
that his utterances were not echoes. If therefore, in these moments of
equable serenity, his mind glancing over trivial things saw them with
great clearness, we might infer that in moments of intense activity his
mind gazing steadfastly on important things, would see wonderful
visions, where to us all was vague and shifting. During our quiet walk
with him across the fields he said little, or little that was
memorable; but his eye was taking in the varying forms and relations of
objects, and slowly feeding his mind with images. The common hedge-row,
the gurgling brook, the waving corn, the shifting cloud-architecture,
and the sloping uplands, have been seen by us a thousand times, but
they show us nothing new; they have been seen by him a thousand times,
and each time with fresh interest, and fresh discovery. If he describe
that walk he will surprise us with revelations: we can then and
thereafter see all that he points out; but we needed his vision to