as though he were writing a newspaper report; but this concreteness of vision translates itself into a remarkable concreteness of speech.  I suppose there was never a more concrete writer than Shakespeare, and his practice of translating all his idea into things which you can touch or see grew steadily stronger throughout his career, so that any competent critic can in a moment distinguish his later writing from his earlier by its compression of images in words, its forcible concretion of the various “parts of speech,” its masterful corvee of nouns substantive to do the work of verbs, and so on.  Even in very early work such as Venus and Adonis we cannot but note this gift of vision, how quick and particular it is....

  Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
  Like a dive-dipper, peering through a wave,
  Who, being look’d on, ducks as quickly in....

But in his later plays—­so fast the images teem—­he has to reach out among nouns, verbs, adverbs, with both strong hands, grasping what comes and packing it ere it can protest.  Take for example:—­

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care.

Or—­

  The multitudinous sea incarnadine,
  Making the green one red.

Or—­

In the dark backward and abysm of time.

Or this from Lear:—­

          My face I’ll grime with filth,
  Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots
  And with presented nakedness outface
  The winds and persecutions of the sky.

Or (for vividness) this, from Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra cries out and faints over Antony’s body:—­

O! withered is the garland of the war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n:  young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon ...

“Madam!  Madam!” “Royal Egypt!” “Empress!” cry the waiting-maids as she swoons.  She revives and rebukes them:—­

No more, but e’en a woman, and commanded By such poor passion as the maid that milks And does the meanest chares.  It were for me To throw my sceptre at the injurious gods; To tell them that this world did equal theirs Till they had stolen my jewel.

When a poet can, as Shakespeare does here, seize upon a Universal truth and lay it bare; when, apprehending passion in this instance, he can show it naked, the master of gods and levelling queens with milkmaids—­totus est in armis idem quando nudus est Amor; when he can reclothe it in the sensuous body of Cleopatra, “Royal Egypt,” and, rending the robe over that bosom, reveal the Idea again in a wound so vividly that almost we see the nature of woman spirting, like brood, against the heaven it defies; then we who have followed the Poet’s ascending claims arrive at his last and highest, yet at one which has lain implicit all along in his title.  He is a Poet—­a “Maker.”  By that name, “Maker,” he used to be known in English, and he deserves no lesser one.