Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/268

238, namely, the conception of beings not drawn The peopled wonderland of song. from experience, to whom it alone can give an existence that is wondrous yet seemingly not out of nature. Such are the forms which Shakespeare called "from the vasty deep": the Weird Sisters, the greenwood sprites, the haunted-island progeny of earth and air. Such are those quite differing creations, Goethe's mocking fiend and the Mephistophilis of Marlowe's "Faustus." Milton's Satan, the grandest of imaginary personages, does not seem to belong to the supramortal class; he is the more sublime because, though scaling heaven and defying the Almighty, he is so unmistakably human. Shakespeare is not strong in the imaginative construction of many of his plays, at least not in the artistic sense,—with respect to that the "Œdipus at Colonos" is a masterpiece,—but he very safely left them to construct themselves. In the conception of human characters, and of their thoughts and feelings, he is still sovereign of imagination's world. In modern times the halls of Wonder have been trodden by Blake and Coleridge Coleridge. and Rossetti. The marvellous "Rime," with its ghostly crew, its spectral seas, its transformation of the elements, is pure and high-sustained imagination. In "Christabel" both the terror and the loveliness are haunting. That beauteous fragment was so potent with the romanticists that Scott formed his lyrical method, that of "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," upon it, and Byron quickly yielded