THE POEMS OP SHAKSPEARE. 459 



Agai, 



" The scalps of many, almost hid behind, 



To jump up higher seem'd to mock the wind." 

 Again, 



' Here one man's hand lean'd on another's head, 

 His nose being shadowed by his neighbour's ear, 

 Here one being thronged bears back all swollen and red." 



How grandly thought and expressed the following ! 



For Achilles' image stood his spear 



Griped in an armed hand, himself behind 

 Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind." 



But there is scarce a description that is not Dantean in force. 

 Milton's genius has been, by some, and most unjustly, assimilated to 

 Dante's, whom he scarce more resembled than his other favourite Ovid. 

 The error has originated from their consent in subject. They have both 

 treated of "heaven, hell, and marriage;" but their modes of producing 

 sublimity are opposite. Milton invades our imagination with the vague . 

 the obscure the mass. Dante with the simple the marked the indi- 

 vidual. A great poet has always a character of his own, which is, #nd 

 can be no one else's, however he may be less distant from one than 

 another. Dante approaches closer to Shakspeare than he does to 

 Milton. A description in "As you like it," has always reminded us of 

 Dante. In the hope that our readers will be as courtly as Polonius, 

 and see our whale in the cloud, we will give it them : 



" Under an oak whose boughs were mossed with age, 

 And high top bald with dry antiquity, 

 A wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair, 

 Lay sleeping on his back : about his neck 

 A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself, 

 Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached 

 The opening of his mouth, but suddenly 

 Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself, 

 And with indented glides did slip away 

 Into a bush, under which bush's shade 

 A lioness with udders all drawn dry 

 Lay couching, head on ground, with cat-like watch, 

 When that the sleeping man should stir." 



There are, in our opinion, few perfections of which the poetic art is capa- 

 ble, unexemplified in these two poems ; and were Shakspeare without 

 another record, these were sufficient to place him in the first rank of 

 poets and philosophers. That power of the pathetic, which no other 

 ever possessed, displays itself here, and we shall read deep into his tra- 

 gedies, without meeting a more affecting scene than the death of 

 Lucrece. Her disclosure of the name of Tarquin is a fine instance of 

 the broken colloquy, that characterises the dramatic muse. After she 

 has, in the language of agony, declared her wrong, without, however, 

 naming her wronger, she entreats " the fair lords that came with 

 Collatine" to plight their faith to avenge her injuries : which, when they 

 had begun to promise, " longing to hear the hateful foe bewrayed," she, 

 unable to restrain her appetite for death, stops their protestation. 



