524 
Or.to that terrific curse in which King, 
Lear pours forth the anguish of a rent 
paternal heart against his ungrateful 
daughter Goneril— 
“ Hear, Nature, hear ! 
Dear Goddess, hear! Suspend thy pur- 
pose, if 
Thou didst intend to make this creature 
fruitful ! 
Into her womb convey sterility ! 
Dry up in her the organs of increase ; 
And from her derogate body never spring 
A babe to honour her! Ifshe must teem, 
Create her child of spleen ; that it may live, 
And be a thwart disnatur’d torment to her! 
Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth ; 
With cadent tears fret channelsin her cheeks ; 
Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits 
To laughter and contempt ; that she may feel 
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is 
To have a thankless child |” 
Or to the whole of those heart-rending 
scenes of the approaching delirium of 
agony, upon the tempest-harrowed heath 
(the 2d and 4th of the 3d act)? In short, 
need J remind the reader that Shaks- 
peare, that this truest, as well as 
“ sweetest child of Nature,” every where 
shews us how deeply he was imbued 
with the conviction, that the strong 
emotions of genuine passion are always 
associated in their expression with the 
picturesque language of imagination ? 
Where else are they to find the strength 
and warmth and versatility of colouring 
that can harmonize with the rapid force 
and vividness of their conceptions ? 
On the other hand, imagination itself, 
even when it deals only with the crea- 
tions of the fancy, becomes, in its 
highest and happiest workings, instinc- 
tively impassioned. “What depth of 
pathos there is, for example, in that 
fanciful or imaginative invocation of 
Prospero, in the fifth act of the Tem- 
pest ! 
“ Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes 
and groves ; 
And ye, that on the sands with printless foot 
Dochase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him, 
by: eek he comes back ; you demi-puppets, 
at 
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets 
make : 
Whereof the ewe not bites ; 
pastime 
Is to make midnight mushrooms; that 
rejoice 
To hear the solemn curfew ; by whose aid 
(Weak masters tho’ ye be), I have bedimm’d 
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous 
winds, 
And ’twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault 
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling 
thunder ~ 
and you whose! 
' 
Advantages and Disadvantages of Periodical Writing. [July 1; . 
Have I[ given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak 
With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d pro-. 
montory ° 
Have I made shake; and by the spurs 
pluck’d up ; 
The pine and cedar: graves, at my command, 
Have wak’d their sleepers; op’d, and let 
them forth 
By my so potent art.” 
I omit, as already too familiar to 
every memory to need quotation, that 
glorious combination of imagination and 
moral pathos, the appeal to the tran- 
sitory frailness of ‘‘ the cloud-capt 
towers, the gorgeous palaces,’ &c., 
which follows in the same scene. It will 
be obvious, in short, to the reflective 
reader, that, in Shakspeare at least, the 
impassioned and the imaginative are 
intimately united. The same may be 
said of Milton, of Homer, of Sophocles, 
—of every genuine and _highly-gifted 
poet—of Burke, of Chatham, of De- 
mosthenes—of every accomplished and 
impassioned orator. Nay, it might even 
be illustrated, not only in the eloquence 
of savage nature (as among the American 
Indians), but even in the impassioned 
language of our own uneducated vulgar— 
who, when strongly excited, never fail © 
to be figurative in the language by 
which they express their emotions. I 
might say the same also, to a cer- 
tain degree (however unprepared the 
mere pedantry of criticism may be 
for the assertion,) of their rhythmical 
modulation. 
Passion or sentiment, when they are 
strongly felt, never fail to attune the 
organs in unison to their impres- 
sions; and the organs, so attuned, in- 
stinctively affect the selection and col- 
location of the language: and thus rhyth- 
mus, euphony, and metaphor, in the 
very nature of things, are part and par- 
cel of our thoughts and feelings, which, 
in their higher excitements at least, 
cannot be expressed without the assist- 
ance of such united agency.* 
And 
* Were I called upon to define “ where- 
in consists the happiest facility for oratori- 
cal excellence ?”’—perhaps I should answer 
—“ In that susceptibility of temperament 
which is capable of the most vivid and 
most versatile excitement ; and which, 
therefore, most readily associates the pas- 
sions with the imagination, and breathes a 
portion, at least, of these into every sub- 
ject upon which its eloquence can be em- 
ployed.” There are other faculties of the 
mind, undoubtedly, requisite to form the 
accomplished orator; but, without a 
a. 
