forth,—like a procession out of a church? Whoever has such an idea, can have had but little experience in composition. Shakspeare himself has laid down the principle, on which all fine compositions are produced, as well as all great actions done. He says,
"There's a Divinity, which shapes our ends,
Rough hew them as we will."
This is equally true in composition as in action: in fact, composition is but one form of action. At the outset, we have our ends "rough-hewn;" we have a general rough idea of what w6 are about to do, a general plan, an outline,—^no more. As we proceed to execute this plan in detail, we find the thoughts coming in, one after another—whence we cannot tell—and oftentimes in a manner and of a character to surprise ourselves; and, not unfrequently, we find ourselves led on in a course that we did not intend, in a strain that we did not at all anticipate, and far better perhaps than we could have anticipated; and pressing on, as the afflatus drives us,—keeping only a general guidance as it were, over our course, as the helmsman seeks to steer his bark dear of rocks and shoals, while the wind and the stream are sweeping him on—we find ourselves at length arrived at a place we had no thought of when we set out; we find our finished work quite of a different character from that which we had proposed; or, if the general plan has been observed (which will indeed be usually the case, if it was first thoroughly considered), yet the shaping of the work, the details, the particular thoughts, images, and expressions, are for the most part new to us—we can hardly tell where they came from—in fact they were given to us as we went on,—furnished by some unseen hand,—inspired by
