mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account."*

Coleridge, in the preceding chapter of his Literary Life, says: "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry-the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination." In Coleridge's Literary Remains the Venus and Adonis is cited as furnishing a signal example of "that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world." The description of the hare-hunt is there given at length as a specimen of this power. A remarkable proof of the completeness as well as accuracy of Shakspere's description lately presented itself to our mind, in running through a little volume, full of talent, published in 1825—Essays and Sketches of Character, by the late Richard Ayton, Esq. There is a paper on hunting, and especially on hare-hunting. He says: "I am not one of the perfect fox-hunters of these realms; but having been in the way of late of seeing a good deal of various modes of hunting, I would, for the benefit of the uninitiated, set down the results of my observations." In this matter he writes with a perfect unconsciousness that he is describing what any one has described before; but as accurate an observer had been before him:

"She (the hare) generally returns to the seat from which she was put up, running, as all the world knows, in a circle, or something sometimes like it, we had better say, that we may keep on good terms with the mathematical. At starting, she tears away at her utmost speed for a mile or more, and distances the dogs half-way: she then returns, diverging Biographia Literaria, 1817, vol. ii. p. 15.

a little to the right or left, that she may not run into the mouths of her enemies. a necessity which accounts for what we call the circularity of her course. Her flight from home is direct and precipitate; but on her way back, when she has gained a little time for consideration and stratagem, she describes a curious labyrinth of short turnings and windings, as if to perplex the dogs by the intricacy of her track."

Compare this with Shakspere:

"And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,
Mark the poor wretch, to overshoot his troubles,
How he outruns the wind, and with what care
He cranks and crosses, with a thousand doubles :
The many musits through the which he goes
Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes."

Mr. Ayton thus goes on:

"The hounds, whom we left in full cry, continue their mu sic without remission as long as they are faithful to the scent; as a summons, it should seem, like the seaman's cry, to pull together, or keep together, and it is a certain proof to themselves and their followers that they are in the right way. On the instant that they are at fault,' or lose the scent, they are silent. . . . The weather, in its impression on the scent, is the great father of 'faults;' but they may arise from other accidents, even when the day is in every respect favourable. The intervention of ploughed land, on which the scent soon cools or evaporates, is at least perilous; but sheep-stains, recently left by a flock, are fatal: they cut off the scent irrecoverably-making a gap, as it were, in the clue, in which the dogs have not even a hint for their guidance." Compare Shakspere again :

"Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep,

To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell,
And sometime where earth-delving conies keep,
To stop the loud pursuers in their yell;

And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer;
Danger deviseth shifts; wit waits on fear;
"For there his smell with others being mingled,
The hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt,
Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled
With much ado the cold fault cleanly out;

Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies."

One more extract from Mr. Ayton:

"Suppose then, after the usual rounds, that you see the hare at last (a sorry mark for so many foes) sorely beleaguered -looking dark and draggled-and limping heavily along; then stopping to listen-again tottering on a little-and again stopping; and at every step, and every pause, hearing the death-cry grow nearer and louder."

One more comparison, and we have exhausted Shakspere's description:

"By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill,

Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To hearken if his foes pursue him still;
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear;

And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell.
"Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn and return, indenting with the way;

Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay:
For misery is trodden on by many,

And being low never reliev'd by any."

Here, then, be it observed, are not only the same objects, the same accidents, the same movement, in each description, but the very words employed to convey the scene to the mind are often the same in each. It would be easy to say that Mr. Ayton copied Shakspere. We believe he did not. There is a sturdy ingenuousness about his writings which would have led him to notice the Venus and Adonis if he had had it in his mind. Shakspere and he had each looked

minutely and practically upon the same scene; and the wonder is, not that Shakspere was an accurate describer, but that in him the accurate is so thoroughly fused with the poetical, that it is one and the same life.

The celebrated description of the courser in the Venus and Adonis is another remarkable instance of the accuracy of the young Shakspere's observation. Not the most experienced dealer ever knew the points of a horse better. The whole poem indeed is full of evidence that the circumstances by which the writer was surrounded, in a country district, had entered deeply into his mind, and were reproduced in the poetical form. The bird "tangled in a net”—the "didapper peering through a wave "-the "blue-veined violets"-the

"red morn, that ever yet betoken'd

Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field”

the fisher that forbears the "ungrown fry "-the sheep "gone to fold "the caterpillars feeding on "the tender leaves ". and, not to weary with examples, that exquisite image,

"Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky,

So glides he in the night from Venus' eye”—

all these bespeak a poet who had formed himself upon nature, and not upon books. To understand the value as well as the rarity of this quality in Shakspere, we should open any contemporary poem. Take Marlowe's Hero and Leander for example. We read line after line, beautiful, gorgeous, running over with a satiating luxuriousness; but we look in vain for a single familiar image. Shakspere describes what he has seen, throwing over the real the delicious tint of his own imagination. Marlowe looks at Nature herself very rarely; but he knows all the conventional images by which the real is supposed to be elevated into the poetical. His most beautiful things are thus but copies of copies. The mode in which each poet describes the morning will illustrate our meaning:

"Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,
From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast
The sun ariseth in his majesty;

Who doth the world so gloriously behold,

The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold."

We feel that this is true. Compare

"By this Apollo's golden harp began
To sound forth music to the ocean;
Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard
But he the day's bright-bearing car prepar'd,
And ran before, as harbinger of light,

And with his flaring beams mock'd ugly Night,
Till she, o'ercome with anguish, shame, and rage,
Dang'd down to hell her loathsome carriage."

We are taught that this is classical.

Coleridge has observed that, "in the Venus and Adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant."* This selfcontrolling power of "varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm" is perhaps one of the most signal instances of Shakspere's consummate mastery of his art, even as a very young man. He who, at the proper season, knew how to strike the grandest music within the compass of our own powerful and sonorous language, in his early productions breathes out his thoughts.

"To the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders."

The sustained sweetness of the versification is never cloying; and yet there are no violent contrasts, no sudden elevations: all is equable in its infinite variety. The early

Biographia Literaria, vol. ii. p. 14.