leanly out,
Then do they spend their mouths; echo replies,
As if another chase were in the skies.

"By this poor Wat far off, upon a hill,
Stands on his hinder legs with listening ear,
To harken if his foes pursue him still:
Anon their loud alarums he doth hear,
And now his grief may be compared well
To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.

"Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch
Turn, and return, indenting with the way:
Each envious briar his weary legs doth scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay.
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low, never relieved by any."

_Venus and Adonis._

And the preceding description:--

"But lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud," &c.

is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.

Moreover Shakespeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the
faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one
point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:--

"Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band:
So white a friend ingirts so white a foe!"--_Ib._

And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally proved
the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which one image
or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of fusion to force
many into one;--that which afterwards showed itself in such might and
energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father spreads the feeling of
ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of heaven;--and which,
combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to
produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity,
and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, who
is alone truly one. Various are the workings of this the greatest faculty
of the human mind, both passionate and tranquil. In its tranquil and
purely pleasurable operation, it acts chiefly by creating out of many
things, as they would have appeared in the description of an ordinary
mind, detailed in unimpassioned succession, a oneness, even as nature, the
greatest of poets, acts upon us, when we open our eyes upon an extended
prospect. Thus the flight of Adonis in the dusk of the evening:--

"Look! how a bright star shooteth from the sky;
So glides he in the night from Venus' eye!"

How ma