Shall we suppose that Shakspeare wrote in such an _opium dream_ as this? Did his "wood-notes wild" come from him as tunes do from a barrel-organ, where it is necessary only to set the machine and disturb the bowels of it by turning? Was it sufficient for him to fore-plan the plots of his plays, the story, acts, scenes, persons,--the general rough idea, or argument,--and then to sit at his table, and, by some process analogous to mesmeric manipulations, put himself into a condition in which his _genius_ should elaborate and shape what he, by the aid of his poetic taste and all other faculties, had been able to rough-hew? How far did his consciousness desert him?--only partially, as in the instance just given, so that he marvelled, while he wrote, at his own fertility, power, and truth?--or wholly, as in a Pythonic inspiration, so that the frenzy filled him to his fingers' ends, and he wrote, he knew not what, until he re-read it in his ordinary state? In fine, was he the mere conduit of a divinity within him?--or was he in his very self, in the nobility and true greatness of his being and the infinitude of his faculties, a living fountain,--he, he alone, in as plain and common a sense as we mean when we say "a man," the divinity?
These are "questions not to be asked," or, at least, argued, any more than the question, Whether the blessed sun of heaven shall eat blackberries. The quality of Shakspeare's writing renders it impossible to suppose that it was produced in any other state than one where all the perceptions that make good sense, and not only good, but most excellent sense, were present and alert. Howsoever "apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes" his brain may be, it never gambols from the superintendence of his reason and understanding. In truth, it is the perfectness of the control, the conscious assurance of soundness in himself, which leaves him so free that the control is to so many eyes invisible; they perceive nothing but luxuriant ease in the midst of intricate complexities of passion and character, and they think he could have followed the path he took only by a sort of necessity which they call Nature,--that he wrote himself quite into his works, bodily, just as he was, every thought that came and went, and every expression that flew to his pen,--leaving out only a few for shortness. They are so thoroughly beguiled by the very quality they do not see, that they are like spectators who mistake the scene on the stage for reality; they cannot fancy that a man put it all there, and that it is by the artistic and poetic power of him, this man, who is now standing behind or at the wing, and counting the money in the house, that they are beguiled of their tears or thrown into such ecstasies of mirth.