It is the only occasion in the play on which he makes Antony speak of Cleopatra by her territorial name, and there is no warrant for the usage in Plutarch. It is a stroke of sheer word-magic. It summons up with a sudden magnificence all the mystery and splendour incarnated in the woman for whom he has gambled away the world and all the earthly glories that are fading into the darkness of death. The whole tragedy seems to flame to its culmination in this word that suddenly lifts the action from the human plane to the scale of cosmic drama.
Words of course have an individuality, a perfume of their own, but just as the flame in the heart of the diamond has to be revealed by the craftsman, so the true magic of a beautiful word only discloses itself at the touch of the master. "Quiet" is an ordinary enough word, and few are more frequently on our lips. Yet what wonderful effects Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats extract from it!
It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;
The holy time is quiet as a nun,
Breathless with adoration.
The whole passage is a symphony of the sunset, but it is that ordinary word "quiet" which breathes like a benediction through the cadence, filling the mind with the sense of an illimitable peace. And so with Coleridge's "Singeth a quiet tune," or Keats's
Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet breathing.
Or when, "half in love with easeful Death," he
Called him soft names in many a musèd rhyme
To take into the air my quiet breath.
And again:
Far from the fiery noon and eve's one star
Sat grey-hair'd Saturn, quiet as stone.
There have been greater poets than Keats, but none who has had a surer instinct for the precious word than he had. Byron had none of this magician touch, Shelley got his effects by the glow and fervour of his spirit; Swinburne by the sheer torrent of his song, and Browning by the energy of his thought. Tennyson was much more of the artificer in words than these, but he had not the secret of the word-magic of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Keats. Compare the use of adjectives in two things like Shelley's "Ode to the Skylark," and Keats's "Ode to the Nightingale," and the difference is startling. Both are incomparable, but in the one case it is the hurry of the song, the flood of rapture that delights us: in the other each separate line holds us with its jewelled word. "Embalmèd darkness," "Verdurous glooms," "Now more than ever seems it rich to die." "Cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth." "Darkling I listen." "She stood in tears amid the alien corn." "Oh, for a beaker full of the warm south." "With beaded bubbles winking at the brim." "No hungry generations tread thee down." And so on. Such a casket of jewels can be found in no other poet that has used our tongue. If Keats's vocabulary had a defect it was a certain over-ripeness, a languorous beauty that, like the touch of his hand, spoke of death. It lacked the fresh, happy, sunlit spirit of Shakespeare's sovran word.