It is so simple that a child might have said it, and so charged with emotion that a man might be forgiven if he could not say it. A Shropshire Lad is full of this surge of feeling dressed in home-spun, as when he says:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
Even in pictorial description the most thrilling effects, as in the case I have quoted from Milton, are produced not by the pomp of words but by the passion of words. In two rapid, breathless lines:
The sun's rim dips, the stars rush out,
With one stride comes the dark,
Coleridge flashes on the mind all the beauty and wonder of the tropic night. And though Shakespeare, like Milton and Wordsworth, could use the grand words when the purpose was rhetorical or decorative, he did not go to them for the expression of the great things of life. Then he speaks with what Raleigh calls the bare intolerable force of King Lear's:
Do not laugh at me,
For as I am a man, I think this lady
To be my child Cordelia.
The higher the theme rises the more simple and austere becomes the speech, until the words seem like nerves bared and quivering to the agony of circumstance:
Lear. And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.—
Do you see this? Look on her, look, her lips,—
Look there, look there! [He dies.
Edgar. He faints! My lord, my lord!—