refined, made translucent by that gift of _sensibility to the fair and
perfect_[3] whereby, according to its degree, we are put in more
loving relation to the work of God, and gain the clearest insights
into his doings and purposes; a gift without which in richest measure
Shakespeare might have been a notable historian or novelist or
philosopher, but never the supreme poet he is.

[3] See preceding Essay.

When Coriolanus, having led the Volscians to Rome, encamps under its
walls, and the Romans, in their peril and terror, send to him a
deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,--the
foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of
Coriolanus,--having "declared their business in a very modest and
humble manner," he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere,
answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of the
injuries done him." What was the temper as well as the power of
Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of
Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our
imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy
to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to
fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that
momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us
to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and
warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur
of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so
mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be
for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to
quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial
metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions