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which had resulted from the energetic fervor of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think, I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working in him, prompting himby a series and never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute; by the highest effort of the picturesque in words, of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted ;*—to provide a substitute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from his players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representations of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told

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4 ["Consider how he paints," says Mr. Carlyle, "he has a great power of vision; seizes the very type of a thing; presents that and nothing more. You remember the first view he gets of the Hall of Dite; red pinnacle, red hot cone of iron glowing through the immensity of gloom ;-so vivid, so distinct, visible at once and for ever! It is as an emblem of the whole genius of Dante." Milton," says Lessing in his Laokoon, "can indeed fill no galleries. Yet is the Par. Lost the first Epic after Homer no whit the less because it affords few pictures, than the History of Christ is a Poem, because we cannot put so much as a nail's head upon it without hitting on a place which has employed a crowd of the greatest artists." "A poetic picture is not necessarily that which can be converted into a material picture; but every stroke or combination of strokes, by which the Poet makes his object so sensuous to us, that we are more conscious of this object than of his words, may be called picturesque." Thus Dante's squilla di lontano (Purg., c. viii., 1. 5) may well be called a picture. His picture-words have not done much for the material painter's art, if we may judge by Flaxman's illustrations. The famous image in the Purgatorio

solo guardando

A guisa di leon quando si posa,

is, as has been shown, not a mere presentation of “picturable matter," but a picture ready drawn and "so clearly visible that the pencil cannot make its outline clearer." (See Art on Pindar, Q. Review, March, 1834.) Yet it would be nothing in a material painting, because the illustration and the thing illustrated could not be given together. S. C.]

nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst ;-that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. Instead of doing as Ariosto, and as, still more offensively, Wieland has done, instead of degrading and deforming passion into appetite, the trials of love into the struggles of concupiscence ;-Shakspeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature. As little can a mind thus roused and awakened be brooded on by mean and indistinct emotion, as the low, lazy mist can creep upon the surface of a lake, while a strong gale is driving it onward in waves and billows.

3. It has been before observed that images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or by associated thoughts or images awakened by that passion; or when they have the ef fect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human and intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet's own spirit,

5

5 ["The truth is, he does not possess imagination in its highest form,that of stamping il più nell' uno." Table Talk, 281, 2d ed.

"The Imagination modifies images, and gives unity to variety; it sees all things in one, il più nell' uno." Ib., p. 306. Ed.]

Which shoots its being through earth, sea, and air.6

In the two following lines for instance, there is nothing objec tionable, nothing which would preclude them from forming, in their proper place, part of a descriptive poem:

Behold yon row of pines, that shorn and bow'd

Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve.

But with a small alteration of rhythm, the same words would be equally in their place in a book of topography, or in a descriptive tour. The same image will rise into a semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

Yon row of bleak and visionary pines,

By twilight glimpse discerned, mark! how they flee
From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild
Streaming before them.

I have given this as an illustration, by no means as an instance, of that particular excellence which I had in view, and in which Shakspeare, even in his earliest, as in his latest works, surpasses all other poets. It is by this, that he still gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power,―

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye."7

"Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come-

*

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd,
And Peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.

6 [France. An ode. Mr. C.'s P. W., i., p. 132. Ed.] [Shakspeare's 33d Sonnet. Ed.]

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And thou in this shalt find thy monument,

When tyrants' crests, and tombs of brass are spent." s

As of higher worth, so doubtless still more characteristic of poetic genius does the imagery become, when it moulds and colors itself to the circumstances, passion, or character, present and foremost in the mind. For unrivalled instances of this excellence, the reader's own memory will refer him to the LEAr, OTHELLO, in short to which not of the "great, ever living, dead man's" dramatic works? Inopem me copia fecit. How true it is to nature, he has himself finely expressed in the instance of love in his 98th Sonnet.

"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April drest in all its trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything;
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odor and in hue,

Could make me any summer's story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them, where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;

They were, tho' sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,

As with your shadow, I with these did play!"

Scarcely less sure, or if a less valuable, not less indispensable mark

Γόνιμου μὲν ποιητοῦ

ὅστις ῥημα γενναῖον λάκοι,10

will the imagery supply, when, with more than the power of the painter, the poet gives us the liveliest image of succession with the feeling of simultaneousness:

8 [Sonnet cvii. Ed.]

9 [See Table Talk, pp. 229-31, 2d edit., for Mr. Coleridge's general view of Shakspeare's Sonnets, and also Mr. Knight's valuable essay on the same subject in that beautiful edition of our great poet by which he has rendered so signal and enduring a service to the cause of English literature. Ed.]

10 [Aristoph., Ranæ, v., 96-7. Mr. Frere, in the tone of the Bacchus of the play, translates thus:

With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those fair arms, which bound him to her breast,

And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;

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4. The last character I shall mention, which would prove deed but little, except as taken conjointly with the former;-yet without which the former could scarce exist in a high degree, and (even if this were possible) would give promises only of transitory flashes and a meteoric power;—is depth, and energy of thought. No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher. For poetry is the blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language. In Shakspeare's poems the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other. Or like two rapid streams, that, at their first meeting within narrow and rocky banks, mutually strive to repel each other and intermix reluctantly and in tumult; but soon finding a wider channel and more yielding shores blend, and dilate, and flow on in one current and with one voice. The VENUS AND ADONIS did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favor and even demand their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakspeare's management of the tale neither pathos, nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colors, inspirited by the same impetuous vigor of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection; and lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world

There's not one hearty Poet amongst them all

That's fit to risque an adventurous valiant phrase. But it is obvious that Mr. Coleridge meant by yoviμos moinτís, the genuine poet. Ed.]

11 [Venus and Adonis. Ed.]

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