"Give me the daggers!"'

who feels not, that, although a dagger be only an artificial thing, no
natural or supernatural thing, not the flaming sword of the Cherubim
itself, could seem, in the circumstances, more fearfully sublime. What
action more artificial than dancing, and yet how grand it seems, in
Ford's heroine, who continues to dance on till the ball is finished,
while the news of "death, and death, and death" of friend, brother,
husband, are successively recounted to her--and then herself expires!
There seems no comparison between a diamond and a star, and yet a
Shakspeare or a Schiller could so describe the trembling of a diamond on
the brow say of Belshazzar when the apparition of the writing on the
wall disturbed his impious feast, that it would seem more ideal and more
magnificent than a star "trembling on the hand of God" when newly
created, or trembling on the verge of everlasting darkness, when its
hour had come. A slipper seems a very commonplace object; but how
interesting the veritable slipper of Empedocles, who flung himself into
Etna, whose slipper was disgorged by the volcano, and as a link,
connecting the seen with the unseen, the grassy earth with the burning
entrails of the eternal furnace, became intensely imaginative! A feather
in a cap (even though it were an eagle's) seems, from its position, an
object sufficiently artificial; but how affecting the black plume of
Ravenswood floating on the waves which had engulphed the proud head that
once bore it, and which old Caleb took up, dried, and placed in his
bosom!

Nor are we sure that there are _any_ objects so small or vulgar but what
genius could extract poetry from them. In Pope's hands, indeed, the
"clouded cane" and the "amber snuff-box" of Sir Plume assume no ideal