are the principal ingredients in the poet's charm: they complete the spell, but are not the essence of it. What takes us captive is the gathering up of ideas in new groups under new bands of words; our senses are ravished by new combinations of words in a poem as by fresh harmonies in an oratorio. In a new combination of words, of course, we are, affected by much beyond the mere sound, though that, doubtless, is a large element to many minds. The words appeal to us by multitudinous associations, awake slumbering echoes in many different chambers of our being: the charm of the new encounter is that it rouses and locks together many memories never before united. Several people in the Elizabethan age, or indeed in any other age, could have led us through "a wood, crowded with interwoven trees and luxuriant bushes, which conceal you and close your path, which delight and dazzle your eyes by the magnificence of their verdure and the wealth of their bloom." Spenser comes very much nearer this description than Shakespeare, to my mind: to me it conveys not the remotest approach to the peculiar effect of Shakespeare. Simple and easy as the operation seems, the power of fresh and effective wordcombination is one of the rarest of gifts: it is indispensable to a great poet; and part of Shakespeare's main distinction among great poets is the possession of this power in an incomparable degree. Something in the effect of his combinations upon us is due, no doubt, to change in the usage of words many words whose conjunction raised no surprise in an Elizabethan, have since wandered away from each other and gathered other associations about them, so that their reunion in our minds is like the reunion of youthful friends in old age. The words lay near each other then, and had little variety of idea to bring into collision: now, in this later stage of their existence, they have lived long apart, they surprise us by their mutual recognition, and they bring many memories into shifting indefinite comparison, indefinably charming collision.

In reading Shakespeare's predecessors, we often meet

with what appear to have been the suggestions or seeds of passages in his plays; and the comparison of the suggestion with its development gives a most vivid notion of the amplitude and rapidity of growth in Shakespeare's mind. So abundant and mobile were words and images in that soil, so warm its generating force, that a seed fallen there at once germinated and shot up with the utmost facility of assimilation into a complete organism. Take a simple case. When Gaveston, in Marlowe's "Edward II.," returns from banishment, and is recognised as the king's favourite, he is besieged by a host of hunters for patronage. Among the rest is a traveller, at whom Gaveston looks for a moment, and then says "Let me see: thou wouldst do well to wait at my trencher and tell me lies at dinner-time; and as I like your discoursing, I'll have you." Shakespeare seems to have been tickled with this deliberate utilisation of the traveller, for he makes the Bastard in "King John," when he has obtained royal favour, take delight in the prospect of the same entertainment. But in Shakespeare's mind the idea ripens into a complete picture of well-fed satisfaction, condescension, obsequiousness, and rambling after-dinner talk ("King John," i. 1, 190).

III. CERTAIN QUALITIES OF HIS POETRY.

The most general reader is impressed by the width of Shakespeare's range through varied effects of strength, pathos, and humour: and minute methodical reading brings an increase of admiration. It must not, however, be supposed that Shakespeare's poetry embraces all the qualities to be found in all other poets-that every effect producible by poetry on the human spirit finds its most conspicuous exemplification in his plays. He fills us with wonder, with submissive awe, with heroic energy; he runs us through the gamut of tears and laughter, smiling and sadness: no mortal man has struck so many different notes; yet with all his marvellous versatility, he had his own individual touch, and

he left an inexhaustible variety of notes to be sounded. Shakespeare was a man of wonderful range; but his plays are not a measure of the effects that lie within the compass of poetic language.

The might that Shakespeare excels in expressing is not the might of slow and regular agencies, but the might of swift and confounding agencies. His power is figured in the boast of Prospero

"To the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak With his own bolt."

The awful energies that he sets in motion move with lightning swiftness and overpowering suddenness: the sublime influence does not soar and sail above us; it comes about our senses, flashing and cracking, dazzling and confounding, like Jove's own bolt. His words pass over us like the burst and ear-deafening voice of the oracle over Cleomenes, surprising the hearer into nothingness; or flame before our amazed eyes like the sight-outrunning activity of Ariel on board the king's ship in the tempest. Milton's sublimity has not the same life, the same magic energy: it is statelier and less intimate: the effect is not so sudden and overwhelming. There is an excitement akin to madness in the swiftly concentrated energy of some of Shakespeare's occa sional bursts. Lear's curses are quivering with compressed

force

All the stored vengeances of heaven fall

On her ungrateful top! Strike her young bones,

Ye taking airs, with lameness!"

And again

"Now all the plagues that in the pendulous air

Hang fated o'er men's faults light on thy daughters!"

There is a similar half-maddening excitement compressed, as it were, with strong hand, but trembling on the verge of frantic explosion in Lucrece's invocation of Night

"O comfort-killing Night, image of hell!

Dim register and notary of shame!
Black stage for tragedies and murders fell!

Vast sin-concealing chaos! nurse of blame!
Blind muffled bawd! dark harbour for defame!
Grim cave of death! whispering conspirator
With close-tongued treason and the ravisher."

Claudio's anticipation of the horrors of death ("Measure for Measure," iii. 1, 118), Lady Macbeth's invocation (i. 5, 40), Calphurnia's description of the portents ("Julius Cæsar," ii. 2, 13), Othello's imprecation on himself (v. 2, 277), are pregnant with a similar energy. Such passages are few and far between, as in a volcanic country you find many grandeurs with supreme accumulations here and there. In Macbeth's dark hints to his wife about the plot to murder Banquo, the sublime passion is calmer and less thrilling, but there is a lurking devil of swift excitability even in that lofty passage :

"Macb. There's comfort yet; they are assailable :
Then be thou jocund; ere the bat hath flown
His cloister'd flight, ere to black Hecat's summons
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums
Hath rung night's yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note.

Lady Macb.

What's to be done?

Macb. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the deed. Come, seeling night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day;

And with thy bloody and invisible hand

Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond

Which keeps me pale! Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood :

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;

While night's black agents to their preys do rouse."

I am not aware that any passage can be quoted from Shakespeare with the composed, stately, sustained grandeur of Milton's description of Satan: Shakespeare's sublime agencies do not move with the same massive dignity—they are instinct with quick life and motion, and their change of

attitude is like lightning. The planetary Miltonic grandeur was not, indeed, suited to his purposes as a dramatist. A Satan of Miltonic dignity put upon the stage must have appeared more or less of a bombast Tamburlaine. Cæsar, 'the foremost man of all this world," who, as Casca mockingly said, "bestrode the narrow world like a Colossus," and who, as he said himself, was "constant as the northern star," is Shakespeare's nearest approach to Miltonic grandeur of conception; but the grandeur is not sustained as in Milton, it is made up by momentary glances of the poet's swift-ranging imagination. Othello is grand with a volcanic grandeur: he is easily moved; he blazes out suddenly with such commands as

"Hold, for your lives!

He that stirs next to carve for his own rage
Holds his soul light; he dies upon his motion."

Henry V. was a favourite with the poet, and the prologue to the play where he appears, after shaking off the base contagious clouds that smothered up his beauty from the world, is conceived in a spirit of swelling sublimity; but mark the nature and attitude of the powers held in reserve by the mighty monarch

"O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention !

A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment."

In accordance with this characteristic, Shakespeare's descriptions of storms and tempests, or the dread witching hour with devilry in the mysterious background; of hurlyburly, riot, and confusion, or vague impending terrors; of hell let loose or hell pent up and stealthily preparing to spring out,—are far and away incomparable. Description is