There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when
all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.

He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet

In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day
is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned
like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)

What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in _Macbeth_! And in _Lear_, as
Jacobi says:

What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and
unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither
and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and
there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending
the clouds.

One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to
justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies
at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms
one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry,
especially in Shakespeare.

With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained
before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical
to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the
Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by
dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and
illuminated all and everything.

Hense says[5];

The personification is plastic when AEschylus calls the heights
the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks
of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are
foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive
army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who
enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of
Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls
laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his
back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did
not, and could not, exist in antiquity.

The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his
feelings, the more he can see in Nature.

Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors,
new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were
for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.

The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod
in his hands