one ere
one can say it lightens, that show us Macbeth groping among the
complexities of thought in his conscience-clouded mind, and reveal the
intricacy rather than enlighten it, while they leave the eye darkened
to the literal meaning of the words, yet make their logical sequence
the grandeur of the conception, and its truth to nature clearer than
sober daylight could. There is an obscurity of mist rising from the
undrained shallows of the mind, and there is the darkness of
thunder-cloud gathering its electric masses with passionate intensity
from the clear element of the imagination, not at random or wilfully,
but by the natural processes of the creative faculty, to brood those
flashes of expression that transcend rhetoric, and are only to be
apprehended by the poetic instinct.

In that secondary office of imagination, where it serves the artist,
not as the reason that shapes, but as the interpreter of his
conceptions into words, there is a distinction to be noticed between
the higher and lower mode in which it performs its function. It may be
either creative or pictorial, may body forth the thought or merely
image it forth. With Shakespeare, for example, imagination seems
immanent in his very consciousness; with Milton, in his memory. In the
one it sends, as if without knowing it, a fiery life into the verse,

"Sei die Braut das Wort,
Braeutigam der Geist";

in the other it elaborates a certain pomp and elevation. Accordingly,
the bias of the former is toward over-intensity, of the latter toward
over-diffuseness. Shakespeare's temptation is to push a willing
metaphor beyond its strength, to make a passion over-inform its
tenement of words; Milton can not resist running a simile on into a
fugue.

One always fancies Shakespeare in his best verses, and Milton at the
keyboard of his organ. Shakespeare's language is no longer the mere
vehicle of thought; it has become part of it, its very flesh and
blood. The pleasure it gives us is unmixt, direct, like that from the
smell of a flower or the flavor of a fruit. Milton sets everywhere his
little pitfalls of bookish association for the memory. I know that
Milton's manner is very grand. It is slow, it is stately, moving as in
triumphal procession, with music, with historic banners, with spoils
from every time and every region, and captive epithets, like huge
Sicambrians, thrust their broad shoulders between us and the thought
whose pomp they decorate. But it is m