r
Than those for preservation cas'd or shame,--
Made good the passage; cried to those that fled,
_Our Britain's harts die flying, not our men_."

And so on to the end of the speech; which is all, from first to last,
as glorious in conception and imagery as it is reckless of rhetorical
form.

* * * * *

I am next to say somewhat touching the Poet's sentence-building, this
being a matter that rhetoricians make much of; though in this, also, I
must in the outset acquit him of any practical respect for the rulings
of courts rhetorical. For here, again, he has no set fashion, no
preferred pattern, no oft-recurring form; nothing at all stereotyped
or modish; but just ranges at large in all the unchartered freedom and
versatility of the English colloquial idiom. You may find in him
sentences of every possible construction; but, except in his early
plays, you can hardly say that he took to any one mould of structure
more than another. So that his most peculiar feature here is absence
of peculiarity. Thought dominates absolutely the whole material of
expression, working it, shaping it, out-and-out, as clay in the
potter's hands; which has no character but what it receives from the
occasion and purpose of the user. As the Poet cares for nothing but to
"suit the action to the word, the word to the action," so his word
takes on forms as various as the action of his persons; nay, more; is
pliant to all their moods and tenses of thought, passion, feeling, and
volition. Thus, in the structure of his sentences, as in other things,
his language is strictly physiognomic of his matter, the speaking
exterior of the inward life; which life is indeed the one sole
organizing principle of it. Accordingly he has specimens of the most
pithy, piercing, sententious brevity; specimens with all the ample and
rich magnificence of ordered pomp; specimens of terse, restrained, yet
rhythmical, and finely-modulated vigour; specimens of the most copious
and varied choral harmony; specimens of the most quiet, simple, and
pure-flowing melody; now a full burst of the many-voiced lordly organ,
now the softest and mellowest notes of the flute. Not only these, but
all the intermediate, and ever so many surrounding varieties of
structure are met with in his omniformity of sentence-building. In
short, the leaves of a forest are hardly more varied in figure and
make than Shakespeare's sentences; so that if these were