"
* * * * *
"And with a tale, forsooth, he commeth to you."--For having stripped
the Idea bare, he has to reclothe it again and in such shape as will
strike forcibly on his hearer's senses. A while back we broke off midway
in a stanza of Sir John Davies. Let us here complete it. There are two
versions. As first Davies wrote:--
_This doth She when from things particular,
She doth abstract the Universal kinds,
Which bodiless and immaterial are,
And can be lodged but only in our minds._
--the last two lines of which are weak and unnecessary. Revising the
stanza, he wrote:--
_This does She, when from individual states
She doth abstract the Universal kinds,
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds,_
--which exactly describes the whole process. Having laid bare the Idea,
our Poet, turning from analysis to synthesis, proceeds to reclothe it in
new particulars of his own inventing, carefully chosen that they may
strike home hardest upon the hearer's perceptions. Now that which
strikes home hardest on a man is a tale which he can grasp by the
concretest images conveyed in the concretest language.
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