"Words, words, Horatio!" Now let us hear Chaucer with his single
stealthy line that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we heard the
murderous tread behind us:
The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak.
Which is the more terrible? Which has more danger in it--Collins's noise
or Chaucer's silence? Here is not the mere difference, you will
perceive, between ornament and simplicity, but between a diffuseness
which distracts, and a condensation which concentres the attention.
Chaucer has chosen out of all the rest the treachery and the secrecy as
the two points most apt to impress the imagination.
The imagination, as concerns expression, condenses; the fancy, on the
other hand, adorns, illustrates, and commonly amplifies. The one is
suggestive, the other picturesque. In Chapman's "Hero and Leander," I
read--
Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,
And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies
How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine,
For her love's sake, that with immortal wine
Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease
Than there was water in the Sestian seas.
In the epithet "star," Hero's thought implies the beauty and brightness
of her lover and his being the lord of her destiny, while in "Neptune's
skies" we have not only the simple fact that the waters are the
atmosphere of the sea-god's realm, but are reminded of that reflected
heaven which Hero must have so often watched as it deepened below her
tower in the smooth Hellespont.
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