“Even as remaineth splendid and serene
The hemisphere of air, when Boreas
Is blowing from that cheek where he is mildest,
Because is purified and resolved the rack
That erst disturbed it, till the welkin laughs
With all the beauties of its pageantry;
Thus did I likewise, after that my lady
Had me provided with a clear response,
And like a star in Heaven the truth was seen.”
Paradiso:  Canto XXVIII.

The first question to ask in regard to a simile found in verse is, Is it poetical?  Is there, as effect of its introduction, any heightening of the reader’s mood, any cleansing of his vision, any clarification of the medium through which he is looking?  Is there a sudden play of light that warms, and, through this warmth, illuminates the object before him?  Few of those just quoted, put to such test, could be called more than conventionally poetical—­if this be not a solecism.  To illustrate one sensuous object by another does not animate the mind enough to fulfill any one of the above conditions.  Such similitudes issuing from intellectual liveliness, there is through them no steeping of intellectual perception in emotion.  They may help to make the object ocularly more apparent, but they do not make the feeling a party to the movement.  When this is done,—­as in the examples from Canto XV. of the “Inferno,” and Canto VIII. of the “Purgatorio,”—­what an instantaneous vivification of the picture!

But in the best of them the poetic gleam is not so unlooked-for bright as in the best of Shakespeare’s.  As one instance out of many:  towards the end of the great soliloquy of Henry V., after enumerating the emblems and accompaniments of royalty, the king continues,—­

  “No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
  Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
  Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave;
  Who, with a body filled, and vacant mind,
  Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;
  Never sees horrid night, the child of hell;
  But, like a lackey, from the rise to set,
  Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night
  Sleeps in Elysium; next day, after dawn,
  Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse”

What a sudden filling of the earth with light through that image, so fresh and unexpected, of the rising sun, with its suggestion of beauty and healthfulness!  Then the far-reaching, transfiguring imagination, that, in a twinkle, transmutes into the squire of Hyperion a stolid rustic, making him suddenly radiant with the glory of morning.  It is by this union of unexpectedness with fitness, of solidity with brilliancy, of remoteness with instantaneous presence, in his figures, denoting overflow of resources, a divine plenitude, so that we feel after Shakespeare has said his best things, that he could go on saying more and better,—­it is especially by this lustrous, ever-teeming fullness of life, this creative readiness, that Shakespeare