"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." And that a powerful imagination, if it is affected by some joy, imagines someone as the bringer of that joy, and if it imagine some nocturnal terror, it changes a bush into a wild beast with great facility. That is to say, he shows himself conscious of the creative virtue of poetry and of its origin in the feelings, which it changes into persons, endowed with ethereal sentiment. But in the equally celebrated passage of _Hamlet,_ he dwells upon the other aspect of artistic creation, upon its universality, and therefore upon its calm and harmony. What Hamlet chiefly insists upon in his colloquy with the players, is "moderation," "for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness." To declare Shakespeare to be a representative of the frenzied and convulsed style in poetry, as has been done several times, is to utter just the reverse of the truth. In this respect, it is well to read the contemporary dramatists, with a view to measuring the difference, indeed the abyss between them. In the famous _Spanish Tragedy_ of Kyd, there is a scene (perhaps due to another hand) in which Hieronymus asks a painter to paint for him the assassin of his own son, and cries out: "There you may show a passion, there you may show a passion.... Make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, Make me well again, make me curse hell, Invocate, and in the end leave me In a trance, and so forth." The same character is attacked by doubt and asks with anxiety: "Can this be done?" and the painter replies: "Yes, Sir." Such was not the method of Shakespeare, who would have made the painter reply, not with a yes, but with a yes and a no together.