scene where
Lavinia enters with her hands cut off and her tongue cut out, little
Robert fell a-crying, and threatened, in case the play was left in the
cottage, to burn it. It is hard to believe that what Burns despised and
detested at the age of nine could have been written by Shakespeare at
the age of twenty-five. Taking, then, "Venus and Adonis" as the point of
departure, we find Shakespeare at the age of twenty-two endowed with all
the faculties, but relatively deficient in the passions, of the poet.
The poem is a throng of thoughts, fancies, and imaginations, but
somewhat cramped in the utterance. Coleridge says, that "in his poems
the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war
embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction
of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought
each with its shield before the breast of the other." Fine as this is,
it would perhaps be more exact to say, that in his earlier poems his
intellect, acting apart from his sensibility, and playing with its own
ingenuities of fancy and meditation, condensed its thoughts in crystals.
Afterwards, when his whole nature became liquid, he gave us his thoughts
in a state of fusion, and his intellect flowed in streams of fire.

Take, for example, that passage in the poem where Venus represents the
loveliness of Adonis as sending thrills of passion into the earth on
which he treads, and as making the bashful moon hide herself from the
sight of his bewildering beauty:--

"But if thou fall, O, then imagine this!
The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips,
And all is but to rob thee of a kiss.
Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips
Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn,
Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn.

"Now of this dark night I perceive the reason:
Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shine,
Till forging Nature be condemned of treason,
For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine.
Wherein she framed thee, in high heaven's despite.
To shame the sun by day and her by night."

This is reflected and reflecting passion, or, at least, imagination
awakening passion, rather than passion penetrating imagination.

Now mark, by contrast, the gush of the heart into the brain, dissolving
thought, imagination, and expression, so that they run molten, in the
delirious ecstasy of Pericles in recovering his long-lo