Indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you--this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
But the great advance which he made is seen far more in the sympathetic way in which he drew Nature into the action of the play.
He established perfect harmony between human fate and the natural phenomena around it.
There are moonlight nights for Romeo and Juliet's brief dream, when all Nature, moon, stars, garden, seemed steeped in love together.
He places his melancholy, brooding Hamlet
In a land of mist and long nights, under a gloomy sky, where day is only night without sleep, and the tragedy holds us imprisoned like the North itself, that damp dungeon of Nature. (BOERNE.)
What a dark shudder lies o'er Nature in Macbeth! And in Lear, as Jacobi says:
What a sight! All Nature, living and lifeless, reasonable and unreasonable, surges together, like towering storm clouds, hither and thither; it is black oppressive Nature with only here and there a lightning flash from God--a flash of Providence, rending the clouds.
One must look at the art by which this is achieved in order to justify such enthusiastic expressions. Personification of Nature lies at the root of it, and to examine this in the different poets forms one of the most interesting chapters of comparative poetry, especially in Shakespeare.
With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.