eauty upon itself;
or in the 'witch element' of the tragedy of _Macbeth_ and the May-day
night of _Faust_;--Seventh, and last, that which by a single
expression, apparently of the vaguest kind, not only meets but
surpasses in its effect the extremest force of the most particular
description; as in that exquisite passage of Coleridge's _Christabel_,
where the unsuspecting object of the witch's malignity is bidden to go
to bed:

Quoth Christabel, So let it be!
And as the lady bade, did she.
Her gentle limbs did she undress,
_And lay down in her loveliness;--_

a perfect verse surely, both for feeling and music. The very
smoothness and gentleness of the limbs is in the series of the letter
_l's_.

I am aware of nothing of the kind surpassing that most lovely
inclusion of physical beauty in moral, neither can I call to mind any
instances of the imagination that turns accompaniments into
accessories, superior to those I have alluded to. Of the class of
comparison, one of the most touching (many a tear must it have drawn
from parents and lovers) is in a stanza which has been copied into
the _Friar of Orders Grey_, out of Beaumont and Fletcher:

Weep no more, lady, weep no more,
Thy sorrow is in vain;
_For violets pluck'd the sweetest showers
Will ne'er make grow again._

And Shakespeare and Milton abound in the very grandest; such as
Antony's likening his changing fortunes to the cloud-rack; Lear's
appeal to the old age of the heavens; Satan's appearance in the
horizon, like a fleet 'hanging in the clouds'; and the comparisons of
him with the comet and the eclipse. Nor unworthy of this glorious
company, for its extraordinary combination of delicacy and vastness,
is that enchanting one of Shelley's in the _Adonais_:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity.

I multiply these particulars in order to impress upon the reader's
mind the great importance of imagination in all its phases, as a
constituent part of the highest poetic faculty.

The happiest instance I remember of imaginative metaphor, is
Shakespeare's moonlight 'sleeping' on a bank; but half his poetry may
be said to be made up of it, metaphor indeed being the common coin of
discourse. Of imaginary creatures, none out of the pale of mythology
and the East are equal, perhaps, in point of invention, to
Shakespeare's Ariel and Caliban; though poetry may grudge to prose the
d