Be any further moved. What you have said
I will consider; what you have to say

I will with patience hear, and find a time
Both meet to hear and answer such high things.
Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this:
Brutus had rather be a villager

Than to repute himself a son of Rome
Under these hard conditions as this time

Is like to lay upon us.

Cas. I am glad that my weak words

Have struck but thus much show of fire from Brutus.

Shakespeare.

PROBLEM XIV. - Read a poem referring to common objects or expressing simple ideas, conceiving the ideas so vividly and uniting them so harmoniously as to awaken noble emotion.

SOMETIMES With secure delight
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebeks sound
To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the chequered shade.

TO MARGUERITE.

YES in the sea of life enisl'd,

With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But when the moon their hollows light,
And they are swept by balms of spring;
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour, -

Oh then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent;

For surely once, they feel we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain —
Oh might our marges meet again!

Who order'd that their longing's fire

Should be, as soon as kindled, cool'd?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance rul'd;
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.

Matthew Arnold.

XI. EFFECT OF PASSION UPON IMAGINATION.

"BETWEEN the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma or a hideous dream.

The mortal instruments are then in council;
And the state of man, like to a little kingdom
Suffers then the nature of an insurrection."

Not only does imagination awaken feeling, but feeling arouses imagination. After Horatio and his companions have seen the ghost at the close of the first scene in "Hamlet," their talk rises to a much higher plane. "The morn with russet mantle clad, walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill." Some have considered this as being untrue to Nature; but these men have seen the ghost, and their imaginations have been aroused.

Macbeth after the murder of Duncan, with conscience quickened and every feeling awake, reveals great activity of imagination. His metaphors are more or less mixed, but their vigor and force manifest the excitement of his mind. The activity of his imagination is the direct effect of the activity of passion.

Notice how Othello, about to strangle Desdemona, sees the little candle, and his awakened feeling impels the imagination to create images and analogies:

Othello.

IF I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore,

Should I repent me; but once put out thine,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume: when I have pluck'd thy rose,

I cannot give it vital breath again;

It needs must wither.

Shakespeare.

The emotions of Romeo in the garden are stirred by the sight of Juliet at the window, and the result is vivid and complex figHis imagination is intensely, "passionately active."

ures.

Romeo. He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.

[Juliet appears above at a window.

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief,

That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she:

Be not her maid, since she is envious;

Her vestal livery is but sick and green,

And none but fools do wear it: cast it off.

It is my lady; oh, it is my love!

Oh that she knew she were !

She speaks, yet she says nothing: what of that}

Her eye discourses, I will answer it.

I am too bold, 't is not to me she speaks:
Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,
Having some business, do entreat her eyes
To twinkle in their spheres till they return.
What if her eyes were there, they in her head?
The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars,
As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven

Would through the airy region stream so bright
That birds would sing and think it were not night.

As silver-voiced; her eyes as jewel-like,

And cased as richly; in face another Juno;

Who starves the ears she feeds, and makes them hungry
The more she gives them speech.

Romeo and Juliet.

Shakespeare.

Intensity of feeling arouses and stimulates the imagination. It has been said by some one that the "literary language is a stagnant pool." The words which men use under pressure of real emotion, these are the running stream, the living spring. That is to say, the domination of passion and imagination are necessary to any effective use of figurative language or literary style. Man must give himself up to feeling, to have any true use of his imagination. Imagination is a spontaneous faculty which cannot be

governed or guided in any deliberative manner. No one can use illustrations by rule, or by any mechanical or artificial process; they must result from abandon to feeling and imagination; they must be dictated by spontaneous impulse.

This is not only true of words in literary composition; it is still more true of the modulations of the voice and the body in reading, acting, or speaking. If words to be living must be dominated by imagination and feeling, how much more must the inflections and textures of the voice and the actions of the body, which belong to natural and more spontaneous modes of expression.

The necessity of abandon has already been shown; but the more fully we pass into the realm of imagination, the more exalted the form of poetry that we read, the more we find mere mechanical or deliberative action inadequate for any effective and natural expression. We must abandon ourselves to the free and spontaneous sway of imagination and feeling.

Imagination and feeling are thus always connected. To awaken imagination we must sympathetically contemplate an object. To read a poem we must meditate upon it quietly, and assimilate every situation. Imagination cannot act without emotion. It refines and ennobles feeling; but feeling in its turn is the motive power of imagination.

WE parted: sweetly gleam'd the stars,

And sweet the vapour-braided blue,

Low breezes fann'd the belfry bars,

As homeward by the church I drew.

OH, it is monstrous, monstrous !
Methought the billows spoke and told me of it;
The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced
The name of Prosper: it did bass my trespass;
Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded, and
I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded,
And with him there lie mudded.

Tennyson.

Tempest.

Shakespeare.

1 See lessons in Vocal Expression, pp. 35-41, and Province of Expression, pp.

184-189.

My wind, cooling my broth,

Would blow me to an ague, when I thought
What harm a wind too great might do at sea.
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run,
But I should think of shallows and of flats;
And see my wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand,
Vailing her high-top lower than her ribs,
To kiss her burial. Should I go to church,
And see the holy edifice of stone,

And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks,
Which, touching but my gentle vessel's side,
Would scatter all her spices on the stream,
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks;
And, in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing.

Gratiano in "Merchant of Venice."

THE MURDER OF DUNCAN.

Shakespeare.

Macbeth. Go bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready,

She strike upon the bell. Get thee to bed.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

[Exit Servant.

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee :

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use. -
Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest: I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There's no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes. - Now o'er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain'd sleep; now witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings; and wither'd Murder,
Alarum'd by his sentinel, the wolf,

Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, toward his designs