And the preceding description:-


But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud, &c.


is much more admirable, but in parts less fitted for quotation.

Moreover Shakspeare had shown that he possessed fancy, considered as the
faculty of bringing together images dissimilar in the main by some one
point or more of likeness, as in such a passage as this:-


Full gently now she takes him by the hand,
A lily prisoned in a jail of snow,
Or ivory in an alabaster band:
So white a friend ingirts so white a foe!

'Ib.'


And still mounting the intellectual ladder, he had as unequivocally
proved the indwelling in his mind of imagination, or the power by which
one image or feeling is made to modify many others, and by a sort of
fusion to force many into one;--that which afterwards showed itself in
such might and energy in Lear, where the deep anguish of a father
spreads the feeling of ingratitude and cruelty over the very elements of
heaven;--and which, combining many circumstances into one moment of
consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought