“Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.”
He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concettisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that remind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples:—
“Oh, if there be another world i’ th’ moon,
As some fantastics dream, I could wish all men,
The whole race of them, for their inconstancy,
Sent thither to people that!”
(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech was the first faithless lover, he adds,—
“And he invented tents, unless men lie,”—
implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.)
“Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds:
In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study,
For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea,
For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which
Arise and spring up honor.”
(“Of all which,” Mr. Hazlitt prints it.)
“Poor Jolenta! should she hear of this,
She would not after the report keep fresh
So long as flowers on graves.”
“For sin and shame are ever tied together
With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun,
They cannot without violence be undone.”