All these—­and I could quote a hundred such—­are, to my thinking, instances of happy and, I will add, even wise audacity:  at least, if there be any overstraining of imagery, I can easily shrive the fault, for the subtile felicity involved in them.  They are certainly quite at home in the millennium of poetry which Shakespeare created for us; albeit I can well remember the time when such transcendent raptures were to me as

                           “Some joy too fine,
    Too subtle-potent, tun’d too sharp in sweetness,
    For the capacity of my ruder powers.”

It would be strange indeed if a man so exceedingly daring did not now and then overdare.  And so I think the Poet’s boldness in metaphor sometimes makes him overbold, or at least betrays him into infelicities of boldness.  Here are two instances, from The Tempest, v. 1: 

           “The charm dissolves apace;

And as the morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses
Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle
Their clearer reason.”

                “Their understanding

Begins to swell; and the approaching tide
Will shortly fill the reasonable shore
That now lies foul and muddy.”

And here is another, of perhaps still more questionable character, from Macbeth, i. 7: 

                      “His two chamberlains

Will I with wine and wassail so convince,
That memory, the warder of the brain,
Shall be a fume, and the receipt of reason
A limbeck only.”

What, again, shall be said of the two following, where Coriolanus snaps off his fierce scorn of the multitude?—­

“What’s the matter, you dissentious rogues,
That, rubbing the poor itch of your opinion,
Make yourselves scabs?”

                          “So shall my lungs

Coin words till their decay against those measles,
Which we disdain should tetter us, yet sought
The very way to catch them.”

Either from overboldness in the metaphors, or from some unaptness in the material of them, I have to confess that my mind rather rebels against these stretches of poetical prerogative.  Still more so, perhaps, in the well-known passage of King Henry the Fifth, iv. 3; though I am not sure but, in this case, the thing rightly belongs to the speaker’s character: 

    “And those that leave their valiant bones in France,
    Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
    They shall be fam’d; for there the Sun shall greet them,
    And draw their honours reeking up to heaven;
    Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
    The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France. 
    Mark, then, abounding valour in our English;
    That, being dead, like to the bullet’s grazing,
    Break out into a second course of mischief,
    Killing in relapse of mortality.”