Thus is imagination a power inherent in, essential to, all intellectual action that ranges above simple perception and memory; a power without which the daily business of life even could not go on, being that power whereby the mind manipulates, so to speak, its materials.  In its higher phasis it may be defined as the intellect stimulated by feeling to multiply its efforts for the ends of feeling; and in its highest it may be said to be intellect winged by emotion to go forth and gather honey from the bloom of creation.

Imagination, then, being intellect in keenest chase, and the intellectual part of the mind being, when moved in concert with the effective part, but a tool of this, what are the feelings or conditions of feeling of which intellect becomes the instrument in the production of poetry?

Cast your look on a page filled with the titles of Shakespeare’s plays.  What worlds of throbbing life lie behind that roll!  Then run over the persons of a single drama:  that one bounded inclosure, how rich in variety and intensity, and truth of feeling!  And when you shall have thus cursorily sent your mind through each and all, tragic, comic, historic, lyric, you will have traversed in thought, accompanied by hundreds of infinitely diversified characters, wide provinces of human sorrow and joy.  Why are these pictures of passion so uniquely prized, passed on from generation to generation, the most precious heir-loom of the English tongue, to-day as fresh as on the morning when the paper was moist with the ink wherewith they were first written?  Because they have in them more fullness and fineness and fidelity than any others.  The poet has more life in him than other men, and Shakespeare has in him more life than any other poet, life manifested through power of intellect exalted through union with power of sympathy, the embodiments whereof are rounded, enlarged, refined, made translucent by that gift of sensibility to the fair and perfect[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.

    [3] See preceding Essay.

When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,—­the foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of Coriolanus,—­having “declared their business in a very modest and humble manner,” he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere, answering them with “much bitterness and high resentment of the injuries done him.”  What was the temper as well as the power of Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of Plutarch.  But the task of the poet is more than