wonder at in our own great dramatist, and is the groundwork of all his other powers: for it is only when purged of selfishness that the intellect becomes fitted for receiving the inspirations of genius."* What Mr. Hare so justly considers as the great moving principle of "classical poetry,"-what he further notes as the pre-eminent characteristic of "our own great dramatist,"-is abundantly found in that great dramatist's earliest work. Coleridge was the first to point out this pervading quality in the Venus and Adonis; and he has done this so admirably, that it would be profanation were we to attempt to elucidate the point in any other than his own words : "It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated. I think I should have conjectured from these poems, that even then the great instinct which impelled the poet to the drama was secretly working in him, prompting him by a series and never-broken chain of imagery, always vivid, and, because unbroken, often minute, by the highest effort of the picturesque in words of which words are capable, higher perhaps than was ever realized by any other poet, even Dante not excepted,-to provide a substi tute for that visual language, that constant intervention and running comment by tone, look, and gesture, which in his dramatic works he was entitled to expect from the players. His Venus and Adonis seem at once the characters themselves, and the whole representation of those characters by the most consummate actors. You seem to be told nothing, but to see and hear everything. Hence it is, that, from the perpetual activity of attention required on the part of the reader,— from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images,—and, above all, from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst,-that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account." + Coleridge, in the preceding chapter of his 'Literary Life,' says, "During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry-the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination." In Coleridge's 'Literary Remains' the Venus and Adonis is cited as furnishing a signal example of "that affectionate love of nature and natural objects, without which no man could have observed so steadily, or painted so truly and passionately, the very minutest beauties of the external world." The description of the hare-hunt is there given at length as a specimen of this power. A remarkable proof of the completeness as well as accuracy of Shakspere's description lately presented itself to our mind. in running through a little volume, full of talent, published in 1825-'Essays and Sketches of Character, by the late Richard Ayton, Esq.' There is a paper on hunting, and especially on hare-hunting. He says "I am not one of the perfect fox-hunters of these realms; but having been in the way of late of seeing a good deal of various modes of hunting, I would, for the benefit of the uninitiated, set down the results of my observations." In this matter he writes with a perfect unconsciousness that he is describing what any one has described before. accurate an observer had been before him : But as "She (the hare) generally returns to the seat from which she was put up, running, as all the world knows, in a circle, or something sometimes like it, we had better say, that we may keep on good terms with the mathematical. At starting, she tears away at her utmost speed for a mile or more, and distances the dogs half-way: she then returns, diverging a little to the right or left, that she may not run into the mouths of her enemies-a necessity which accounts for what we call the circularity of her course. Her flight from home is direct and precipitate; but on her way back, when she has gained a little time for consideration and stratagem, she describes a curious labyrinth of short turnings and windings, as if to perplex the dogs by the intricacy of her track." *The Victory of Faith; and other Sermons.' By Julius Charles Hare, M.A. 1810. P. 277. Compare this with Shakspere : Mr. Ayton thus goes on: : "And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare, * "The hounds, whom we left in full cry, continue their music without remission as long as they are faithful to the scent; as a summons, it should seem, like the seaman's cry, to pull together, or keep together, and it is a certain proof to themselves and their followers that they are in the right way. On the instant that they are 'at fault,' or lose the scent, they are silent. * The weather, in its impression on the scent, is the great father of 'faults;' but they may arise from other accidents, even when the day is in every respect favourable. The intervention of ploughed land, on which the scent soon cools or evaporates, is at least perilous; but sheep-stains, recently left by a flock, are fatal: they cut off the scent irrecoverablymaking a gap, as it were, in the clue, in which the dogs have not even a hint for their guidance." Compare Shakspere again "Sometime he runs among a flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell, And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer; "For there his smell with others being mingled, Then do they spend their mouths: Echo replies, One more extract from Mr. Ayton : "Suppose then, after the usual rounds, that you see the hare at last (a sorry mark for so many foes) sorely beleaguered-looking dark and draggled-and limping heavily along; then stopping to listen-again tottering on a little-and again stopping; and at every step, and every pause, hearing the death-cry grow nearer and louder." One more comparison, and we have exhausted Shakspere's description : "By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill, And now his grief may be compared well "Then shalt thou see the dew-debabbled wretch And being low never reliev'd by any." Here, then, be it observed, are not only the same objects, the same accidents, the same movement, in each description, but the very words employed to convey the scene to the mind are often the same in each. It would be easy to say that Mr. Ayton copied Shakspere. We believe he did not. There is a sturdy ingenuousness about his writings which would have led him to notice the Venus and Adonis if he had had it in his mind. Shakspere and he had each looked minutely and practically upon the same scene; and the wonder is, not that Shakspere was an accurate describer, but that in him the accurate is so thoroughly fused with the poetical, that it is one and the same life. The celebrated description of the courser in the Venus and Adonis is another remarkable instance of the accuracy of the young Shakspere's observation. Not the most experienced dealer ever knew the points of a horse better. The whole poem indeed is full of evidence that the circumstances by which the writer was surrounded, in a country district, had entered deeply into his mind, and were reproduced in the poetical form. The bird "tangled in a net"—the "di-dapper peering through a wave"-the "blue-veined violets"—the "Red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field "— the fisher that forbears the "ungrown fry"-the sheep "gone to fold"—the caterpillars feeding on "the tender leaves"—and, not to weary with examples, that exquisite image, "Look how a bright star shooteth from the sky, So glides he in the night from Venus' eye "— all these bespeak a poet who had formed himself upon nature, and not upon books. To understand the value as well as the rarity of this quality in Shakspere, we should open any contemporary poem. Take Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander' for example. We read line after line, beautiful, gorgeous, running over with a satiating luxuriousness; but we look in vain for a single familiar image. Shakspere describes what he has seen, throwing over the real the delicious tint of his own imagination. Marlowe looks at Nature herself very rarely; but he knows all the conventional images by which the real is supposed to he clevated into the poetical. His most beautiful things are thus but copies of copies. The mode in which each poet describes the morning will illustrate our meaning "Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty; Who doth the world so gloriously behold, The cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold." Coleridge has observed that, "in the Venus and Adonis, the first and most obvious excellence is the perfect sweetness of the versification; its adaptation to the subject; and the power displayed in varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm than was demanded by the thoughts, or permitted by the propriety of preserving a sense of melody predominant."* This self-controlling power of ". 'varying the march of the words without passing into a loftier and more majestic rhythm" is perhaps one of the most signal instances of Shakspere's consummate mastery of his art, even as a very young man. He who, at the proper season, knew how to strike the grandest music within the compass of our own powerful and sonorous language, in his early productions breathes out his thoughts "To the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorder." The sustained sweetness of the versification is never cloying; and yet there are no violent contrasts, no sudden elevations: all is equable in its infinite variety. The early comedies are full of the same rare beauty. In Love's Labour's Lost-The Comedy of Errors--A Midsummer Night's Dream-we have verses of alternate rhymes formed upon the same model as those of the Venus and Adonis, and producing the same feeling of placid delight by their exquisite harmony. The same principles on which he built the versification of the Venus and Adonis exhibited to him the grace which these elegiac harmonies would impart to the scenes of repose in the progress of a dramatic action. We proceed to the Lucrece. Of that poem the date of the composition is fixed as accurately as we can desire. In the dedication to the Venus and Adonis the poet says "If your honour seem Biographia Literaria,' vol. ii., p. 14. but pleased I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours till I have honoured you with some graver labour." In 1594, a year after the Venus and Adonis, Lucrece was published, and was dedicated to Lord Southampton. This, then, was undoubtedly the "graver labour;" this was the produce of the "idle hours" of 1593. Shakspere was then nearly thirty years of age-the period at which it is held by some he first began to produce anything original for the stage. The poet unquestionably intended the "graver labour" for a higher effort than had produced the "first heir" of his invention. He describes the Venus and Adonis as "unpolished lines"-lines thrown off with youthful luxuriousness and rapidity. The verses of the Lucrece are "untutored lines"-lines formed upon no established model. There is to our mind the difference of eight or even ten years in the aspect of these poems--a difference as manifest as that which exists between Love's Labour's Lost and Romeo and Juliet. Coleridge has marked the great distinction between the one poem and the other : "The Venus and Adonis did not perhaps allow the display of the deeper passions. But the story of Lucretia seems to favour, and even demand, their intensest workings. And yet we find in Shakespeare's inanagement of the tale neither pathos nor any other dramatic quality. There is the same minute and faithful imagery as in the former poem, in the same vivid colours, inspirited by the same impetuous vigour of thought, and diverging and contracting with the same activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties; and with a yet larger display, a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection: and, lastly, with the same perfect dominion, often domination, over the whole world of language." It is in this paragraph that Coleridge has marked the difference-which a critic of the very highest order could alone have pointed out-between the power which Shakspere's mind possessed of going out of itself in a narrative poem, and the dramatic power. The same mighty, and to most unattainable, power, of utterly subduing the self-conscious to the universal, was essential to the highest excellence of both species of composition,—the poem and the draina. But the exercise of that power was essentially different in each. Coleridge, in another place, says, "in his very first production he projected his mind out of his own particular being, and felt, and made others feel, on subjects no way connected with himself except by force of contemplation, and that sublime faculty by which a great mind becomes that on which it meditates."+ But this "sublime faculty" went greatly farther when it became dramatic. In the narrative poems of an ordinary man we perpetually see the narrator. Coleridge, in a passage previouly quoted, has shown the essential superiority of Shakspere's narrative poems, where the whole is placed before our view, the poet unparticipating in the passions. There is a remarkable example of how strictly Shakspere adhered to this principle in his beautiful poem of A Lover's Complaint. There the poet is actually present to the scene: "From off a hill whose concave womb re-worded A plaintful story from a sistering vale, My spirits to attend this double voice accorded, But not one word of comment does he offer upon the revelations of the "fickle maid full pale." The dramatic power, however, as we have said, is many steps beyond this. It dispenses with narrative altogether. It renders a complicated story, or stories, one in the action. It makes the characters reveal themselves, sometimes by a word. It trusts for everything to the capacity of an audience to appreciate the greatest subtleties, and the nicest shades of passion, through the action. It is the very reverse of the oratorical power, which repeats and explains. And how is it able to effect this prodigious mastery over the senses and the understanding? By raising the mind of the spectator, or reader, into such a state of poetical excitement as corresponds in some degree to the excitement of the poet, and thus clears away the mists of our ordinary vision, and irradiates the whole complex moral world in which we for a time live, and move, and have our being, with the brightness of his own intellectual sunlight. Now, it appears to us that, although the Venus and Adonis, and the Lucrece, do not pretend to be the creations of this wonderful power-their forms did not demand its complete exercise-they could not have been produced by a man who did not possess the power, * Biographia Literaria,' vol. ii., p. 21. Literary Remains,' vol. ii., p. 54. an 1 had assiduously cultivated it in its own proper field. In the second poem, more especially, do we think the power has reached a higher development, indicating itself in "a yet wider range of knowledge and reflection." Malone says, "I have observed that Painter has inserted the story of Lucrece in the first volume of his Palace of Pleasure,' 1567, on which I make no doubt our author formed his poem." Be it so. The story of Lucrece in Painter's novel occupies four pages. The first page describes the circumstances that preceded the unholy visit of Tarquin to Lucrece; nearly the whole of the last two pages detail the events that followed the death of Lucrece. A page and a half at most is given to the tragedy.. This is proper enough in a narrative, whose business it is to make all the circumstances intelligible. But the narrative poet, who was also thoroughly master of the dramatic power, concentrates all the interest upon the main circumstances of the story. He places the scene of those circumstances before our eyes at the very opening: "From the besieged Ardea all in post, Borne by the trustless wings of false desire, The preceding circumstances which impel this journey are then rapidly told. Again, after the crowning action of the tragedy, the poet has done. He tells the consequences of it with a brevity and simplicity indicating the most consummate art: "When they had sworn to this advised doom, They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence; He has thus cleared away all the encumbrances to the progress of the main action. He would have done the same had he made Lucrece the subject of a drama. But he has to tell his painful story and to tell it all: not to exhibit a portion of it, as he would have done had he chosen the subject for a tragedy. The consummate delicacy with which he has accomplished this is beyond all praise, perhaps above all imitation. He puts forth his strength on the accessaries of the main incident. He delights to make the chief actors analyse their own thoughts,-reflect, explain, expostulate. All this is essentially undramatic, and he meant it to be so. But then, what pictures does he paint of the progress of the action, which none but a great dramatic poet, who had visions of future Macbeths and Othellos before him, could have painted! Look, for example, at that magnificent scene, when No comfortable star did lend his light," of Tarquin leaping from his bed, and, softly smiting his falchion on a flint, lighting a torch "Which must be lode-star to his lustful eye." Look, again, at the exquisite domestic incident which tells of the quiet and gentle occupation of his devoted victim : The hand to which that glove belongs is described in the very perfection of poetry :~ "Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet; whose perfect white In the chamber of innocence Tarquin is painted with terrific grandeur, which is overpowering by the force of contrast: "This said he shakes aloft his Roman blade, The complaint of Lucrece after Tarquin has departed was meant to be undramatic. The action advances not. The character develops not itself in the action. But the poet makes his heroine |