this.  To our imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that momentous hour in the being of the young republic.  He must dilate us to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur of the time and the actors.  The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons.  This vast history, to be for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa.  Of what gigantic dimensions must he be, this Roman!  Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer of Coriolanus, depict him.  Having described, in those compressed sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his nature, he adds, “When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the ground shrinks before his treading.  He is able to pierce a corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery.  He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander.  What he bids be done is finished with his bidding:  he wants nothing of a god but eternity and a heaven to throne in.”

Hear how a mother’s heart, about to break, from the loss of her son, utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering with poetic fervor.  The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:  she answers,—­

  “No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
  But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
  Death, death.  O amiable lovely death! 
  Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness! 
  Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
  Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
  And I will kiss thy detestable bones;
  And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;
  And ring these fingers with thy household worms;
  And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
  And be a carrion monster like thyself: 
  Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil’st: 
  And buss thee as thy wife!  Misery’s love,
  O, come to me!”

In these two passages from “Coriolanus” and “King John” what magnificence of hyperbole!  The imagination of the reader, swept on from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet.  And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the naked truth.  Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors, taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from the benches of a popular lecture-room.  To the expanded mold wherein the passages are wrought, a few—­five or six, perhaps, of the twenty—­would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the poet’s climax.  To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by, the poetically imaginative light.  And to some they would be grossly unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to them unnatural or affected.