Shakespeare’s imagination is of the same plastic kind as his conception of character or passion. ‘It glances from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven.’ Its movement is rapid and devious. It unites the most opposite extremes: or, as Puck says, in boasting of his own feats, ‘puts a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ He seems always hurrying from his subject, even while describing it; but the stroke, like the lightning’s, is sure as it is sudden. He takes the widest possible range, but from that very range he has his choice of the greatest variety and aptitude of materials. He brings together images the most alike, but placed at the greatest distance from each other; that is, found in circumstances of the greatest dissimilitude. From the remoteness of his combinations, and the celerity with which they are effected, they coalesce the more indissolubly together. The more the thoughts are strangers to each other, and the longer they have been kept asunder, the more intimate does their union seem to become. Their felicity is equal to their force. Their likeness is made more dazzling by their novelty. They startle, and take the fancy prisoner in the same instant. I will mention one or two which are very striking, and not much known, out of Troilus and Cressida. Æneas says to Agamemnon, ‘I ask that I may waken reverence, And on the cheek be ready with a blush Modest as morning, when she coldly eyes The youthful Phœbus.’ Ulysses urging Achilles to shew himself in the field, says— ‘No man is the lord of anything, Till he communicate his parts to others: Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause, Where they’re extended! which like an arch reverberates The voice again, or like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back Its figure and its heat.’ Patroclus gives the indolent warrior the same advice. ‘Rouse yourself; and the weak wanton Cupid Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold, And like a dew-drop from the lion’s mane Be shook to air.’