THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
which the poet's faults if perceived at all are measured as lapses from his true self. From Germany, though he denied it, the elder Coleridge learned to deal with Shakspere as with a god, whose mind was of a higher order than ours, yet might with labor be dimly learned; whose clearest utterance hinted at divine plans not in our fate to conceive, but only to admire; whose occasional vacuities meant no more than that the god perchance was sleeping or on a journey. "A nature humanized," Coleridge pictures Shakspere, "a genial understanding directing self-consciously a power and an implicit wisdom deeper even than our consciousness." Again, echoing the theme of his son's verses, he gives us this conception of a meditating, Coleridgean Shakspere—"The body and substance of his works came out of the depths of his own oceanic mind; his observation
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