“I ask that I may waken reverence,
      And on the cheek be ready with a blush
      Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes
      The youthful Phoebus.”

Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says—­

      “No man is the lord of any thing,
      Till he communicate his parts to others: 
      Nor doth he of himself know them for aught,
      Till he behold them formed in the applause,
      Where they’re extended! which like an arch reverberates
      The voice again, or like a gate of steel,
      Fronting the sun, receives and renders back
      Its figure and its heat.”

Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice.

      “Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid
      Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
      And like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane
      Be shook to air.”

Shakspeare’s language and versification are like the rest of him.  He has a magic power over words:  they come winged at his bidding; and seem to know their places.  They are struck out at a heat, on the spur of the occasion, and have all the truth and vividness which arise from an actual impression of the objects.  His epithets and single phrases are like sparkles, thrown off from an imagination, fired by the whirling rapidity of its own motion.  His language is hieroglypnical.  It translates thoughts into visible images.  It abounds in sudden transitions and elliptical expressions.  This is the source of his mixed metaphors, which are only abbreviated forms of speech.  These, however, give no pain from long custom.  They have, in fact, become idioms in the language.  They are the building, and not the scaffolding to thought.  We take the meaning and effect of a well-known passage entire, and no more stop to scan and spell out the particular words and phrases, than the syllables of which they are composed.  In trying to recollect any other author, one sometimes stumbles, in case of failure, on a word as good.  In Shakspeare, any other word but the true one, is sure to be wrong.  If any body, for instance, could not recollect the words of the following description,

“------Light thickens,
And the crow makes wing to the rooky wood,”

he would be greatly at a loss to substitute others for them equally expressive of the feeling.  These remarks, however, are strictly applicable only to the impassioned parts of Shakspeare’s language, which flowed from the warmth and originality of his imagination, and were his own.  The language used for prose conversation and ordinary business is sometimes technical, and involved in the affectation of the time.  Compare, for example, Othello’s apology to the senate, relating “his whole course of love,” with some of the preceding parts relating to his appointment, and the official dispatches from Cyprus.  In this respect, “the business of the state does him offence.”—­His versification is no less powerful, sweet, and varied.  It has every occasional excellence, of sullen intricacy, crabbed and perplexed, or of the smoothest and loftiest expansion—­from the ease and familiarity of measured conversation to the lyrical sounds