There is a passage in “Tamburlaine” which I remember reading in the first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet’s feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea:—
“If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;—
If these had made one poem’s period,