ALTHOUGH many persons may maintain that the last two or three examples from the Naturalist’s division of our subject ought to be reserved as Emblems to illustrate Poetic Ideas, the animals themselves may be inventions of the imagination, but the properties assigned to them appear less poetic than in the instances which are now to follow. The question, however, is of no great importance, as this is not a work on Natural History, and a strictly scientific arrangement is not possible when poets’ fancies are the guiding powers.
How finely and often how splendidly Shakespeare makes use of the symbolical imagery of his art, a thousand instances might be brought to show. Three or four only are required to make plain our meaning. One, from All’s Well that Ends Well (act i. sc. 1, l. 76, vol. iii. p. 112), is Helena’s avowal to herself of her absorbing love for Bertram,—
“My imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. ’Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Might I be comforted, not in his sphere.