Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meeting
Leander:--

It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate...,

and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting with
Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:--

Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So, at his bloody view--

I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be
lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But
you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract,
nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on
he learned to pack into verse, such as:--

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

Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us take
Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something very
like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over
definite, detailed, and what I may call _solidified sensation_. Let us