work.  The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them.  He is making perpetual trials of them as if his mastery over them were doubted.  The images, which are often striking, are generally applied to things which they are the least like:  so that they do not blend with the poem, but seem stuck upon it, like splendid patchwork, or remain quite distinct from it, like detached substances, painted and varnished over.  A beautiful thought is sure to be lost in an endless commentary upon it.  The speakers are like persons who have both leisure and inclination to make riddles on their own situation, and to twist and turn every object or incident into acrostics and anagrams.  Everything is spun out into allegory; and a digression is always preferred to the main story.  Sentiment is built up upon plays of words; the hero or heroine feels, not from the impulse of passion, but from the force of dialectics.  There is besides, a strange attempt to substitute the language of painting for that of poetry, to make us see their feelings in the faces of the persons; and again, consistently with this, in the description of the picture in Tarquin and LUCRECE, those circumstances are chiefly insisted on, which it would be impossible to convey except by words.  The invocation to Opportunity in the Tarquin and LUCRECE is full of thoughts and images, but at the same time it is overloaded by them.  The concluding stanza expresses all our objections to this kind of poetry: 

     Oh! idle words, servants to shallow fools;
     Unprofitable sounds, weak arbitrators;
     Busy yourselves in skill-contending schools;
     Debate when leisure serves with dull debaters;
     To trembling clients be their mediators: 
     For me I force not argument a straw,
     Since that my case is past all help of law.

The description of the horse in Venus and Adonis has been particularly admired, and not without reason: 

     Round-hoof’d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
     Broad breast, full eyes, small head, and nostril wide,
     High crest, short ears, straight legs, and passing strong,
     Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide: 
       Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
       Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

Now this inventory of perfections shows great knowledge of the horse; and is good matter-of-fact poetry.  Let the reader but compare it with a speech in the midsummer night’s dream where Theseus describes his hounds—­

       And their heads are hung
     With ears that sweep away the morning dew—­

and he will perceive at once what we mean by the difference between Shakespeare’s own poetry, and that of his plays.  We prefer the passionate Pilgrim very much to the lover’s complaint.  It has been doubted whether the latter poem is Shakespeare’s.