2. Philosophic vision.
3. A sense of the ludicrous.
4. An emotional perception of beauty.
5. Harmony.
6. Art.
All of these might be dilated on, but not here.
It is a notable truth that the poetic mind never appears fully to mature. A man often writes a whole bible of verses, of which but one per cent., or from that to ten, is worth preserving. If he produces one or two favourite poems, a mild people accepts the whole, but only feeds on the little income of its large capital. A voluminous writer may succeed in yielding a fine harvest on the whole; the wheats beyond all praise, the barleys good, the oats plentiful; but the roots indifferent and the potato crop decidedly bad.
It would be a curious sight if one could inspect the proceedings of Fame Insurance Companies, in which Shakespeare had a policy for millions all paid up, and invested in the hearts of generations unborn; in which, if Coleridge has not a tithe of the amount, he is yet rich with the well-earned increment ever increasing; and Wordsworth, who teaches moral as well as poetic divinity, is not very far behind him. There I pause, accepting contemporary poets as more or less life-annuitants.
There is, perhaps, no example of retrospective imagination (it is at once so dramatic, so poetic) like the opening words of Gloucester in the play of Richard III.
Before Shakespeare’s day, drama and poetry lived very much apart—one may say entirely separate in the Greek; no less so than chemical science and geology may do at the present time: Shakespeare, in much of his work, made them one.