of them. It is not the murderous blow, but the depraved will; not the pale victim, but the shocked conscience; not the muttered prayer, the frantic penance, the suicide, but remorse working itself out, that hold our attention. Plot here manifests the law of character outwardly; but the human reality lies within, and to be seen requires the illumination which only our own hearts can give. All fiction is such a shadowing forth of the soul. The constancy, the intimacy, the profundity with which Shakspere felt this, from the earliest syllables of his art, and the frequency with which he dwells upon it, mark a characteristic of genius. Says Richard II:—

So Theseus, of the play of the rude artisans of Athens, excusing all art: "The best in this kind are but shadows." So Hamlet; so Prospero.

Action is vital in us, and has a double order of phenomena; so far as these are physical, their law is one of the physical world, and interests us no more than other physical laws; so far as they belong in the inward world of self-consciousness, their law is spiritual, and has human interest as being operant in a soul like our own. The external fact is seized by the eye as a part of nature; the internal fact is of the unseen world, and is beheld only in the light which is within our own bosoms—it is spiritually discerned. On the stage plainly this is the case. So far as the actions are for the eye of sense alone they are merely spectacular; so far as they express desires and energies, they are dramatic, and these we do not see but feel according as our experience permits us so to comprehend them. We contemplate a world of emotion there in connection with the active energy of the will, a world of character in operation in man; we feed it from our life, interpret it therefrom, build it up in ourselves, suffering the illusion till absorbed in what is arising in our consciousness under the actor's genius we become ourselves the character. The greatest actor is he who makes the spectator play the part. So far is the drama from the scene that it goes on in our own bosoms; there is the stage without any illusion whatsoever; the play in vital for the moment in ourselves.

And what is true of the stage is true of life. It is only through our own hearts that we look into the hearts of others. We interpret the external signs of sense in terms of personality and experience known only within us; the life of will, head, and heart that we ascribe to our nearest and dearest friends is something imagined, something never seen any more than our own personality. Thus our knowledge of them is not only fragmentary, as has been said; it is 

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