The truth is, that ideal personifications are commonly little better than pinchbeck substitutes for imagination. They are a refuge which unimaginative minds seek from their own sterile imaginativeness. They stand in the same relation to poetry as wax figures to sculpture. The more nearly they counterfeit reality, the more unpleasant they are, and there is always a dejected irresponsibleness about the legs and a Brattle street air in the boots that is ludicrous. The imagination gives us no pictures, but the thing itself. It goes out for the moment to dwell in and inform with its own life the object of its vision--as Keats says somewhere in one of his letters, “I hop about the gravel and pick up crumbs in the sparrows.” And so, in personifying, the imagination must have energy to project its own emotion so as to see it objectively--just as the disease of the hypochondriac runs before him in a black dog. Thus it was that the early poets, “who believed the wonders that they sang,” peopled the forests, floods, and mountains with real shapes of beauty or terror; and accordingly in primitive times _ecstasy_ is always attributed to the condition of the poetic mind. To the great poets these ecstasies are still possible, and personification had its origin in the tradition of these, and the endeavor of inferior minds to atone for their own languor by what we may call historical or reminiscental imagination. Here is indicated the decline from faith to ritual. Shakspeare has illustrated the true secret of imaginative personification when he makes the conscience of Macbeth become external and visible to him in the ghastly shape at the banquet which he alone can see, and Lady Macbeth’s afterwards in the blood-stain on her hand. This is the personification of the creative mind whose thoughts are not images, but _things_. And this seems to have been the normal condition of Shakspeare’s genius, as it is the exceptional one of all other poets. He alone has embodied in flesh and blood his every thought and fancy and emotion, his every passion and temptation. Beside him all other poets seem but the painters and not the makers of men. He sent out his profound intellect to look at life from every point of view, and through the eyes of all men and women from the highest to the lowest. In every one he seems to have tapped it with the knuckles, to have said sadly, _Tinnit, inane est_, It rings, it is hollow; and then to have gone down quietly to wait for death and another world at Stratford.