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 Proteus. 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 th