ground shrinks before his treading. He is able to pierce a
corselet with his eye; he talks like a knell, and his hum is a
battery. He sits in his state, as a thing made for Alexander. What he
bids be done is finished with his bidding: he wants nothing of a god
but eternity and a heaven to throne in."

Hear how a mother's heart, about to break, from the loss of her son,
utters its grief when it has the privilege of using a voice quivering
with poetic fervor. The French king bids Lady Constance be comforted:
she answers,--

"No, I defy all counsel, all redress,
But that which ends all counsel, true redress,
Death, death. O amiable lovely death!
Thou odoriferous stench! sound rottenness!
Arise forth from the couch of lasting night,
Thou hate and terror to prosperity,
And I will kiss thy detestable bones;
And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows;
And ring these fingers with thy household worms;
And stop this gap of breath with fulsome dust,
And be a carrion monster like thyself:
Come, grin on me; and I will think thou smil'st:
And buss thee as thy wife! Misery's love,
O, come to me!"

In these two passages from "Coriolanus" and "King John" what
magnificence of hyperbole! The imagination of the reader, swept on
from image to image, is strained to follow that of the poet.
And yet, to the capable, how the pile of amplification lifts out the
naked truth. Read these passages to a score of well-clad auditors,
taken by chance from the thoroughfare of a wealthy city, or from the
benches of a popular lecture-room. To the expanded mold wherein the
passages are wrought, a few--five or six, perhaps, of the
twenty--would be able to fit their minds, zestfully climbing the
poet's climax. To some they would be dazzling, semi-offensive
extravagance, prosaic minds not liking, because seeing but dimly by,
the poetically imaginative light. And to some they would be grossly
unintelligible, the enjoyment of the few full appreciators seeming to
them unnatural or affected.

Now, the enjoyment of the few appreciators, what is its source? By
these passages certain feelings in them are made to vibrate and are
pitched to a high key. A very comprehensive word is feelings. What is
the nature of those feelings thus wrought upon?

The elementary feelings of our nature, when in healthful function, are
capable of emitting spiritual light; and, when exalted to their purest
action, do and must emit such, the inward fire