not well the gift of tongue,
Can lift your blood up with persuasion."

That is, you can better kindle your spirits to the work by thinking
with yourselves what is to be done, than my small power of speech can
heat your courage up for the fight by any attempts at persuasion. The
well-known words of Juliet--"That runaway's eyes may wink"--come
under the same class of cases; and how hard such forms of language
sometimes are to understand, may be judged from the interminable
discussion occasioned by that famous passage. And it must be
confessed, I think, that in several cases of this kind perspicuity is
not a little sacrificed to metrical convenience and verbal dispatch.
But Shakespeare wrote with the stage in view, not the closet; and he
doubtless calculated a good deal on the help of the actor's looks,
tones, and gestures, in rendering his meaning intelligible.

As regards the other points in Shakespeare's arrangement of words, I
have little more to say than that here again his practice has nothing
bookish or formal about it, but draws right into life and the living
speech of men. He has no settled rules, no favourite order. In this
respect, as in others, language was in his hands as limber as water at
the fountain. He found it full of vital flexibility, and he left it
so; nay, rather made it more so. As he did not learn his craft in the
little narrow world of school rhetoricians, where all goes by the
cut-and-dry method, and men are taught to "laugh by precept only, and
shed tears by rule," but from the spontaneous rhetoric of the great
and common world; so we find him varying the order of his words with
the unconscious ease of perfect freedom, and moulding his language
into an endless diversity of shapes. Perhaps I cannot better express
his style in this behalf than by saying that he pitches right into the
matter, instead of walking or wording round it; not looking at all to
the gracefulness of his attitudes or the regularity of his motions,
but driving straight ahead at directness, compactness, perspicuity,
and force; caring little for the grammar of his speech, so it convey
his sense; and taking no thought about the facility or even
possibility of parsing, but only to get the soul of his purpose into a
right working body. Thus in _Cymbeline_, iii. 2, where the hard-beset
Imogen is first beguiled into the hope of meeting her husband at
Milford Haven:

"Then, true Pisanio,--