even 'Consider how the lilies
grow.' It says, 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly
chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch
and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the
particular. He does it even in "Venus and Adonis" (as Professor Wendell,
of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare,
published some ten years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" side
by side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot but
mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualised
image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, the abstract term, the
thing seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of which
start out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins:--

Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds:
Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds,
And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,
All headlong throws herself the clouds among.

Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to his
hero and to business without ado:--

Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face--
(You have the sun visualised at once),
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn.

When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:--

Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.

Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:--

Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meeting
Leander:--

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate...,

and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting with
Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:--

Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So, at his bloody view--

I do not den