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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 show it naked, the master of gods and levelling queens with milkmaids–totus est in armis idem quando nudus est Amor; when he can reclothe it in the sensuous body of Cleopatra, “Royal Egypt,” and, rending the robe over that bosom, reveal the Idea again in a wound so vividly that almost we see the nature of woman spirting, like brood, against the heaven it defies; then we who have followed the Poet’s ascending claims arrive at his last and highest, yet at one which has lain implicit all along in his title. He is a Poet–a “Maker.” By that name, “Maker,” he used to be known in English, and he deserves no lesser one.

* * * * *

I have refrained in these pages, and purposely, from technical talk and from defining the differences between Epic, Dramatic, Lyric Poetry: between the Ode and the Sonnet, the Satire and the Epigram. To use the formula of a famous Headmaster of Winchester, “details can be arranged,” when once we have a clear notion of what Poetry is, and of what by nature it aims to do. My sole intent has been to clarify that notion, which (if the reader has been patient to follow me) reveals the Poet as a helper of man’s most insistent spiritual need and therefore as a member most honourable in any commonwealth: since, as Ben Jonson says: “Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur”–these two only, a King and a Poet, are not born every year. The Poet “makes”–that is to say, creates–which is a part of the divine function; and he makes–using man’s highest instruments, thought and speech–harmonious inventions that answer the harmony we humbly trace in the firmament fashioned, controlled, upheld, by divine wisdom. “Non c’e’ in mondo,” said Torquato Tasso proudly, “chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta”–“Two beings only deserve the name of Creator: God and the Poet.”