ness or even grandeur of figurative speech, would
have proved a hindrance instead of a conductor to the feeling,
smothering and not facilitating expression. But when, turned out of
doors in "a wild night," by those "unnatural hags," his daughters,
Lear, baring his brow to the storm, invokes the thunder to

"Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world,"

there is no tenderness, no folding of the sore heart upon itself;
there is the expansion of defiance, outburst of the mighty wrath of an
outraged father and wronged and crownless king: and so we have a gush
of the grandest diction, of the most tempestuous rhythm, the storm in
Lear's mind marrying itself with a ghastly joy to the storm of the
elements, the sublime tumult above echoed in the crashing splendor of
the verse:--

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving-thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' the world!
Crack nature's moulds, all germins spill at once,
That make ingrateful man!"

I know of no other single passage that exhibits so clearly the
colossal dimensions of Shakespeare. Here is attained, with almost
unique effect, what according to Schiller is the aim of poetry, "no
other than to give to humanity its fullest possible expression, its
most complete utterance."

The best poetry, like the best music, soars towards the upper light.
The genuinely poetical always lifts up the thought on the swell of
emotion. The thought moves free and strong because there is a deep,
bubbling head of feeling behind it. Feeling, at its best, has an
ascending movement, reaching up towards that high sphere where,
through their conjunction, the earthly and the spiritual play in
freedom in the sunshine of the beautiful. The surest test of the
presence of poetry is buoyancy, springiness, which comes from the
union, the divine union, of the spiritual and the beautiful. However
weighty it may be with thought, the poetical passage floats,
thus giving certain sign of life, of a soul irrepressible.

But as in the forest there cannot be height of stem without strength
and breadth of root, the highest poetry is the most solid, the firmest
set in reality, in truth. The higher a poet is, the closer hold he has
of the roots of his