us extraordinarily
definite and concrete and therefore vivid--as Dante, for example, will
describe a Scene in Hell or in Paradise with as much particularity as
though he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness of
vision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech. I
suppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and his
practice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch or
see grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competent
critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by
its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the
various "parts of speech," its masterful _corvee_ of nouns substantive
to do the work of verbs, and so on. Even in very early work such as
_Venus and Adonis_ we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick and
particular it is....

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

But in his later plays--so fast the images teem--he has to reach out
among nouns, verbs, adverbs, with both strong hands, grasping what comes
and packing it ere it can protest. Take for example:--

_Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care._

Or--

_The multitudinous sea incarnadine,
Making the green one red._

Or--

_In the dark backward and abysm of time._

Or this from Lear:--

_My face I'll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky._

Or (for vividness) this, from _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Cleopatra
cries out and faints over Antony's body:--

_O! withered is the garland of the war,
The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls
Are level now with men; the odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon ..._

"Madam! Madam!" "Royal Egypt!" "Empress!" cry the waiting-maids as she
swoons. She revives and rebukes them:--

_No more, but e'en a woman, and commanded
By such poor passion as the maid that milks
And does the meanest chares. It were for me
To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods;
To tell them that this world did equal theirs
Till they had stolen my jewel._

When a poet can, as Shakespeare does here, seize upon a Universal truth
and lay it bare; when, apprehending _passion_ in this instance, he can
s