ing the excitement to a climax without any apparent rhetorical devices is seen in the halfmad heroine's retort to her tormentors - "I am Duchess of Malfi still." The Elizabethan drama is thick-set with such electric utterances. Lady Macbeth's

Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

Lear's five-fold "Never," Antony's "I am dying, Egypt, dying," are Shakespearean examples; and the whole last scene of Othello, from the Moor's soliloquy, beginning,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul, to "the bloody period," rises again and again to these utterances at white heat.

But it must not be supposed that the quality of intensity is displayed only in scenes of turbulent passion and in tragic catastrophes. It is found in the vivid realization of any mood, pathetic or humorous, energetic or placid, as well as harrowing. We have it in the calm utterance of the resignation of Manoa, in Milton's tragedy, after the death of Samson :

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame, nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

We have it again in the imaginative wistfulness of Wordsworth's

Will no one tell me what she sings ?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:

and even in the same poet's desolate line in Michael,

And never lifted up a single stone.

It is equally there in the bacchanalian zest of
Burns's chorus:

We are na fou, we're nae that fou,
But just a drappie in our e'e!
The cock may craw, the day may daw,
And ay we'll taste the barley-bree!

It is in the languor of the Lotos-Eaters
Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel,
as well as in the strenuousness of Ulysses,
who

Drunk delight of battle with his peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

III

It is not without significance that in most of the instances quoted, the intensity which is exhibited is an imaginative intensity. The examples were not chosen with this in view, but have been given as they came to mind. But of our three fundamental qualities, it is clearly imagination that most readily kindles emotion, as emotion in turn awakens imagination. It is on this account that romantic poetry offers most freely examples of intensity, and that there exists a common impression that Romanticism is mainly characterized by an abundant display of feeling. But, as has already been pointed out, not all feeling is poetic feeling, and both persons and words may overflow with emotion without being in any notable degree poetic. The feeling, as we have tried to show, must be attached to those other elements so often enumerated, roused by them and rousing them in turn. This is the distinction Poe had in mind when he called the poetic principle "an elevating excitement of the soul," in contradistinction to mere "passion, which is the excitement of the heart." On the other hand, intensity must be capable of illustration in classical and realistic poetry as well as romantic, if our view of its essential nature be correct. But we must not expect it to appear in precisely the same way, since it will be modified by the predominant quality with which it is associated. In classical art, it will naturally be less exuberant, more restrained, but not of necessity weaker. The passages already cited from Samson Agonistes illustrate this point, and that poem contains many more. Paradise Lost opens with the conventional invocation of the classical epic, yet the first paragraph rises by this quality of intensity to a splendid poetical pitch :

And chiefly Thou, O Spirit! that dost prefer
Before all temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast abyss
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.

Here at once the poet's exhilaration with the prospect of his colossal task and with his superb confidence in his power to accomplish it by the Divine aid, seizes the reader also, and "rouses, frees, dilates" as no verse without intensity can do. And throughout the twelve long books of the epic, while the flagging of the attention that most readers confess to is at times due to the reasoning and abstract element attaining an excessive predominance over the other elements, it is, perhaps, oftener due to a letting down of the "elevating excitement of the soul," a relaxing in the poet's own mood of the intensity which ever and anon blazes up again, and is as evident as anywhere in the restrained but profoundly moving close:

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide :
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.

A still more illuminating instance is to be found in the same poet's Lycidas. This elegy, despite the fact of its depreciation by the neoclassical critics of the eighteenth century, is an admirable example of truly classical art, in its structure and technic, and in its restraint, as well as in its reverence for traditional form. The two most vital passages in the poem, however, are digressions: one on fame, the other on the degradation of the English Church; and in spite of the exquisite beauty of the flower passage, and the unsurpassed skill in rhythm which the elegy exhibits throughout, these digressions rise by virtue of their greater intensity to another level, and seize the reader with a far firmer grasp.

One more example in poetry of a classical type may be given. Arnold's Sohrab and Rus