of ability, and understood in the latter in the sense of capacity,—inaccurately, because power is an attribute of action, not of reception. But the hand which should undertake to rectify these errors in construction by rule and plummet would find that it had strength enough only to bring down the noble though irregular structure in a ruin that would overwhelm the rash endeavor with disgrace and ridicule.

There is, however, a vagueness in some passages of Shakespeare's poetry which is intentional, and which is a result of the highest art,a vagueness which magnifies an image, generally of terror, that would be belittled by being drawn with sharper outline. This is a trait of Gothic art, and is not peculiar to Shakespeare, or indeed to poetry; for it finds its place in Gothic architecture. Schiller has been much praised, and somewhat over-praised, for his use of the indefinite neuter pronoun "it" in his ballad, The Diver, to indicate the fabled polypus, which, however, he immediately describes.* But Shakespeare, who seems to have been beforehand with most modern poets in all their happiest devices, had in this effect anticipated and surpassed Schiller, and had availed himself of our indefinite dread of unknown horrors in the recesses of the sea, not only, like Schiller, to leave upon the mind a vague image of

"It saw a hundred-armed creature-its prey."

Sir E. Bulwer Lytton's Translation.

How

the unknown creature itself, but to heighten our dread of, and aversion to, unnatural crime. indefinite the comparison when Lear exclaims:

"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child,
Than the sea-monster!"

*

What is the sea monster? Yet how much more of horror is suggested by that definite indefinity, than if the comparison had been in terms to a crocodile or a kraken! And in other modes, and for other reasons than the heightening of an image, Shakespeare is sometimes vague, and in expressing abstract thought or simple emotion purposely indefinite. He is aided in his effects of this kind by a singular felicity in framing phrases which convey ideas by mere suggestion, and which at once fill mind and ear with a satisfaction, the reason for which escapes close analy

*I will here remark that the happy comparison made by Swift, so often quoted, and always as his, of those able and wellinformed men who are yet hesitating speakers, to a full church, which, from its very fulness, is emptied more slowly than if the congregation were a small one, was taken by the Dean from Shakespeare. And it shows how little the Lucrece is read, that this appropriation has not been pointed out before.

"Her maid is gone, and she prepares to write,
First hovering o'er the paper with her quill.
Conceit and grief an eager combat fight;
What wit sets down is blotted straight with will;
This is too curious good, this blunt and ill :
Much like a press of people at a door

Throng her inventions, which shall go before."

sis. What, for instance, is the exact meaning of the last two lines of this passage from one of Macbeth's soliloquies ?

"Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man, that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not."

Yet there is no doubt that it leaves upon the mind just the impression which Shakespeare intended to make; and that probably the intelligent reader of sensitive organization but uncritical mind is placed by it more in sympathy with the poet's mood than some of those who have harder heads and subtler intellects. So as to the phrase "blood-boltered Banquo," it may be safely doubted if any modern reader on first meeting with the passage knew positively the meaning of "boltered"; but it may be as safely believed that few readers, except those who read a play as the mathematician did, to see what it all proves, did not receive from the sound of the phrase, and a vaguely attributed sense, the impression intended by the poet.

Akin to this power in Shakespeare is that of pushing hyperbole to the verge of absurdity; of mingling heterogeneous metaphors and similes which, coldly examined, seem discordant; in short, of apparently setting at naught the rules of rhet

oric, without paying the penalty by the critics in such case made and provided. Thus, when Cleopatra, about to send a message to Antony, says, "Give me ink and paper.

He shall have every day a several greeting,

Or I'll unpeople Egypt,"

how needlessly extravagant is the hyperbole in regard to the number of messengers, three hundred and sixty-five of whom would have conveyed a several greeting to Antony every day for a year! But it is really reflective in its effect; it is a revelation of Cleopatra's character; and as a measure of her feeling toward her lover, and of her consciousness of absolute power, it is in keeping. Of both mixed metaphor and apparently discordant simile, where is there a more flagrant seeming example than the following passage from the Tempest, the beauty of which, as a whole, is transcendent?

"The charm dissolves apace :

And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses

Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clear reason."

Now if the beauty and propriety of metaphor depended upon the exact, the material and mechanical conformity of images, what a hotchpot would be here! Indeed, a learned and generally judicious critic of the last century has selected this very passage as a shocking example of mixed

metaphor, in which "so many ill-sorted things are joined that the mind can see nothing clearly.” And if it were necessary to the beauty and the force of the metaphor that we should picture to ourselves a figure of the dawn stealing upon a figure of the darkness, and at the same time melting it up in a pot, and that we should see a likeness between this process and the equally incomprehensible one of senses rising up and running after uninstructed fumes which were casting a mantle over reason, it need hardly be said that the passage would be ridiculous. But not thus does the mind receive the impression of a metaphor. And in this passage, as in hardly any other in the range of poetry, is the tender glory of the dawning day gently dispelling the darkness that covers the face of nature brought up before the mind; and it is to this image, not sharply defined, but seen as if in a mental twilight, that Prospero compares his charm's dissolving. It should ever be remembered, too, in our judgment of a poet's, and especially a dramatic poet's, fancies and expressions of emotion, that they are to be looked upon from his plane of vision. If we do not rise with him to the point to which he has risen, much that has to his eye due proportion will to us seem monstrous. To one who stands upon a mountain-top, objects, the size and opposite character of which strike the eye of him who remains upon the plain, are dwarfed into