Who long'st, like me, to see thy lord; who long'st,--
O, let me bate,--but not like me;--yet long'st,--
But in a fainter kind;--O, not like me,
For mine's beyond beyond;--say, and speak thick,--
Love's counsellor should fill the bores of hearing
To th' smothering of the sense,--how far it is
To this same blessed Milford: and, by th' way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
T' inherit such a haven: but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence; and for the gap
That we shall make in time, from our hence-going,
And our return, t' excuse:--but, first, how get hence:
Why should excuse be born or e'er begot?
We'll talk of that hereafter."

What a chaos of verbal confusion have we here, until we penetrate to
the soul of the heroine! and then what a pavilion of life and beauty
this soul organizes that chaos into! How ignorant the glorious
creature is of grammar; yet how subtile and sinewy of discourse! How
incorrect her placing of words, yet how transfigured with grace of
feeling and intelligence! Just think into what a nice trim garden of
elocution a priest of the correct and classical church, like Pope,
would have dressed this free outpouring of the speaker's heart. No
doubt the language would be faultlessly regular; you might analyze and
parse it _currente lingua_; but how lifeless and odourless the whole
thing! how all the soul of nature, which now throbs so eloquently in
it, would have been dried and crimped out of it! The workmanship, in
short, to borrow an illustration from Schlegel, would have been like
the mimic gardens of children; who, eager to see the work of their
hands, break off twigs and flowers, and stick them in the ground;
which done, the childish gardener struts proudly up and down his showy
beds.

Perhaps the Poet's autocratic overshooting of grammar and rhetoric is
still better instanced in the same play, v. 3, where Posthumus relates
the doings of old Belarius and the Princes in a certain lane. On being
asked, "Where was this lane?" he replies:

"Close by the battle, ditch'd, and wall'd with turf;
Which gave advantage to an ancient soldier,--
An honest one, I warrant; who deserv'd
So long a breeding as his white beard came to,
In doing this for 's country: athwart the lane,
He, with two striplings,--lads more like to run
The country base than to commit such slaughter;
With faces fit for masks, or rather faire