Up hither, from among the trees appear'd,

Presence Divine. Rejoicing, but with awe,

In adoration at his feet I fell,

Submiss: He rear'd me, and, Whom thou sought'st I am,
Said mildly, Author of all this thou seest

Above, or round about thee, or beneath.

-Paradise Lost, 8: Milton.

Now let us go back and take up examples in which, in descriptions of persons, too much attention, relatively, is paid to the thought as contrasted with the form. The following is a passage of this kind. Through a series of explanations, it appeals directly to the understanding, scarcely at all to the imagination.

I admire

Him and his fortunes, who hath wrought thy safety;
Yea as my mind predicts, with thine his own.
Obscure and friendless he the army sought;

Bent upon peril in the range of death.
Resolved to hunt for fame and with his sword
To gain distinction which his birth denied.
In this attempt unknown he might have perished,
And gained with all his valor but oblivion.
Now graced by thee his virtue serves no more
Beneath despair. The soldier now of hope,
He stands conspicuous: fame and great renown
Are brought within the compass of his sword.

-Douglas, 2: Home.

Here is another passage of the same sort :

Turn up thine eyes to Cato!

There mayest thou see to what a godlike height
The Roman virtues lift up mortal man.
While good and just and anxious for his friends
He's still severely bent against himself;
Renouncing sleep, and rest, and food, and ease,
He strives with thirst and hunger, toil and heat;
And, when his fortune sets before him all
The pomp and pleasures that his soul can wish,
His rigid virtues will accept of none.

-Cato, 1, 4: Addison.

Contrast with this the following description of Ogier the Dane in William Morris' Earthly Paradise. The representation here is just as direct as in the foregoing, but, in a sense not true of it, each sentence presents a picture.

Great things he suffered, great delights he had,
Unto great kings he gave good deeds for bad;
He ruled o'er kingdoms, where his name no more
Is had in memory, and on many a shore
He left his sweat and blood, to win a name
Passing the bounds of earthly creature's fame.
A love he won and lost, a well-loved son
Whose little day of promise soon was done.
A tender wife he had, that he must leave

Before his heart her love could well receive.

-Ogier the Dane.

Of course some will think that these lines are not far removed from the level of prose. But they could not well be made more poetic without using illustrative representation, the introduction of which into passages of this kind is much the best way of making them appeal to the imagination. To recognize this fact one has only to compare the following descriptions of natural scenery with those given a few moments ago. The first deviates only slightly from the methods of direct representation.

In front

The sea lay laughing at a distance; near,

The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;

And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,-
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields.

-The Prelude, 4: Wordsworth.

In the second the figures stand out more clearly:

At my feet

Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.

A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapors stretched,
In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared

To dwindle, and give up his majesty,

Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.

-Prelude, 14: Wordsworth.

Now look at the effects of illustrative representation upon descriptions of persons, as in this:

O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, scholar's, soldier's eye, tongue, sword:
The expectancy and rose of the fair State,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers.

And in this:

-Hamlet, iii., I: Shakespear.

He was not born to shame :

Upon his brow shame is ashamed to sit;

For 't is a throne where honor may be crowned

Sole monarch of the universal earth.

-Romeo and Juliet, iii., 2: Idem.

And in these series of pictures presented to the imagi. nation in Sir Richard Vernon's description of Prince Harry and his troops:

All furnished, all in arms;

All plumed like estridges that wing the wind;
Bated like eagles having lately bathed ;
Glittering in golden coats, like images ;
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry,—with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed,―
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,

As if an angel dropped down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,

And witch the world with noble horsemanship.

-1 Henry IV., iv., 1: Shakespear.

Notice, too, to what an extent the element of beauty is introduced into the following, through the use of illus trative representation :

For up the porch there grew an Eastern rose

That, flowering high, the last night's gale had caught,
And blown across the walk. One arm aloft-
Gowned in pure white, that fitted to the shape-
Holding the bush, to fix it back, she stood.

A single stream of all her soft brown hair
Poured on one side: the shadow of the flowers
Stole all the golden gloss, and, wavering
Lovingly lower, trembled on her waist-

Ah, happy shade !—and still went wavering down,
But ere it touched a foot that might have danced
The green sward into greener circles, dipt
And mixed with shadows of the common ground!
But the full day dwelt on her brows, and sunned
Her violet eyes, and all her Hebe-bloom,
And doubled his own warmth against her lips,
And on the bounteous wave of such a breast
As never pencil drew. Half light, half shade,
She stood, a sight to make an old man young.
-The Gardener's Daughter: Tennyson.

Milton says that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and passionate. The above certainly meets all these requirements. Read this too from Shakespear's Antony and Cleopatra:

I will tell you.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;

Purple the sails, and so perfumed, that

The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver;

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water, which they beat, to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth of gold, of tissue)
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy out-work nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers colored fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they did, undid.

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereids,

So many mermaids, tended her i' th' eyes,
And made their bends adoring: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers; the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthron'd i' th' market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

-Antony and Cleopatra, ii., 2: Shakespear. Perhaps no poetical passage could exemplify better than this that which distinguishes the sensuous from the sensual. Describing conditions which some of our modern poets would think would justify them in throwing every shred of drapery overboard, it reveals nothing that the most delicate taste cannot enjoy. The picture appeals solely to the imagination, and to nothing lower, which proves that Shakespear, although a poet, had enough practical sense to know that verse which does not appeal to the highest æsthetic nature cannot be in the highest sense artistic.