THE MIND OF SHAKESPERE
"In the dead vast and middle of the night."
"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change."
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety."
Does not the secret of this imaginative speech lie in the poet's clearness of vision and in his immediateness and accuracy of expression? Such words cannot be found by careful search in one's vocabulary; they are found, if at all, in the thing contemplated, when the energy of the poet's nature provides—to take a liberty with his own phrase—that the firstlings of his sight shall be the firstlings of his speech. To a degree children have this spontaneous felicity, at least as long as they keep a naive approach to language. Until they are spoiled by self-consciousness they do not think the words—they see them, as
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