The universe, and all its fair and glorious forms, are indeed included in the wide empire of the imagination; but she has placed her home and her sanctuary amidst the inexhaustible varieties and the impenetrable mysteries of the mind.
In tutte parti impera, e quivi regge; Quivi e la sua cittade, e l'alto seggio.
(Inferno, canto i.) Othello is perhaps the greatest work in the world.

From what does it derive its power?
From the clouds?
From the ocean?
From the mountains?
Or from love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave?
What is it that we go forth to see in Hamlet?
Is it a reed shaken with the wind?
A small celandine?
A bed of daffodils?
Or is it to contemplate a mighty and wayward mind laid bare before us to the inmost recesses?
It may perhaps be doubted whether the lakes and the hills are better fitted for the education of a poet than the dusky streets of a huge capital.

Indeed who is not tired to death with pure description of scenery?
Is it not the fact, that external objects never strongly excite our feelings but when they are contemplated in reference to man, as illustrating his destiny, or as influencing his character?
The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.

But who that can analyse his feelings is not sensible that she owes her fascination less to grace of outline and delicacy of colour, than to a thousand associations which, often unperceived by ourselves, connect those qualities with the source of our existence, with the nourishment of our infancy, with the passions of our youth, with the hopes of our age--with elegance, with vivacity, with tenderness, with the strongest of natural instincts, with the dearest of social ties?
To those who think thus, the insensibility of the Florentine poet to the beauties of nature will not appear an unpardonable deficiency.

On mankind no writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, has looked with a more penetrating eye.