“------His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear’d
Less than archangel ruin’d, and th’ excess
Of glory obscur’d;”—­

the mixture of beauty, of grandeur, and pathos, from the sense of irreparable loss, of never-ending, unavailing regret, is perfect.

The great fault of a modern school of poetry is, that it is an experiment to reduce poetry to a mere effusion of natural sensibility; or what is worse, to divest it both of imaginary splendour and human passion, to surround the meanest objects with the morbid feelings and devouring egotism of the writers’ own minds.  Milton and Shakspeare did not so understand poetry.  They gave a more liberal interpretation both to nature and art.  They did not do all they could to get rid of the one and the other, to fill up the dreary void with the Moods of their own Minds.  They owe their power over the human mind to their having had a deeper sense than others of what was grand in the objects of nature, or affecting in the events of human life.  But to the men I speak of there is nothing interesting, nothing heroical, but themselves.  To them the fall of gods or of great men is the same.  They do not enter into the feeling.  They cannot understand the terms.  They are even debarred from the last poor, paltry consolation of an unmanly triumph over fallen greatness; for their minds reject, with a convulsive effort and intolerable loathing, the very idea that there ever was, or was thought to be, any thing superior to themselves.  All that has ever excited the attention or admiration of the world, they look upon with the most perfect indifference; and they are surprised to find that the world repays their indifference with scorn.  “With what measure they mete, it has been meted to them again.”—­

Shakespeare’s imagination is of the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion.  “It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.”  Its movement is rapid and devious.  It unites the most opposite extremes; or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, “puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.”  He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s, is sure as it is sudden.  He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials.  He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude.  From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together.  The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become.  Their felicity is equal to their force.  Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty.  They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant.  I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida.  AEneas says to Agamemnon,