Farewell house, and farewell home,
She’s for the Moores and martyrdom.
These verses were ever present to my mind whilst writing the second part of Christabel; if, indeed, by some subtle process of the mind they did not suggest the first thought of the whole poem.—Poetry, as regards small poets, may be said to be, in a certain sense, conventional in its accidents and in its illustrations; thus Crashaw uses an image:—
As sugar melts in tea away,
which, although proper then, and true now, was in bad taste at that time equally with the present. In Shakspeare, in Chaucer there was nothing of this.
The wonderful faculty which Shakspeare above all other men possessed, or rather the power which possessed him in the highest degree, of anticipating everything, evidently is the result—at least partakes—of meditation, or that mental process which consists in the submitting to the operation of thought every object of feeling, or impulse, or passion observed out of it. I would be willing to live only as long as Shakspeare were the mirror to nature.
What can be finer in any poet than that beautiful passage in Milton—
——Onward he moved
And thousands of his saints around.