spirits of "just men made perfect" on high, the angel-minds of all the heavenly host. The mind of Newton is to that vast Mind as a drop to the ocean; as, truly, he himself, in his beautiful yet just modesty, said of himself, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself with now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all unexplored before me."
Turn we now to contemplate another stream from this great Fountain,—the sparkling of whose waters, the swiftness of its flow, and the grace of its meanderings, with the myriad beautiful objects borne upon its bosom,—will probably interest us yet more than the tranquil depth and clearness of the one that we have just been contemplating, and will afford new evidence of the richness of the Source whence it proceeds. I allude to the mind of Shakspeare. If, in Newton, "God geometrizes,"—in Shakspeare, truly, He poetizes; if the powers seen in the one, prove their Divine Author to be the Great Geometer, those exhibited by the other prove Him the Great Poet: for all abilities and excellences, in whatever men appearing, are—in the beautiful language of Thomson,
—"but the varied God."
With what various and admirable gifts does the mind of Shakspeare seem to have been endowed! First, let us observe his musical ear, his talent for rhythm,— among the lowest, perhaps, of his endowments, but indispensable to a poet. See it gently bending even the English idiom itself to its requirements:—
