y 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,

"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 hieroglyphical. 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