" What was the temper as well as the power of
Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of
Plutarch. But the task of the poet is more than this. To our
imagination, that is, to the abstracting intellect roused by sympathy
to a semi-creative state, he must present the haughty Roman so as to
fill us with an image of him that shall in itself embody that
momentous hour in the being of the young republic. He must dilate us
to the dimensions of the man and the moment; he must so enlarge and
warm our feeling that it shall take in, and delight in, the grandeur
of the time and the actors. The life of Rome, of Rome yet to be so
mighty, is threatened by one of her own sons. This vast history, to be
for future centuries that of the world, a Roman seemed about to
quench, about to rase the walls that were to embrace the imperial
metropolis of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Of what gigantic dimensions
must he be, this Roman! Now hear Menenius, a former friend and admirer
of Coriolanus, depict him. Having described, in those compressed
sinewy phrases which Shakespeare has at command, the change in his
nature, he adds, "When he walks, he moves like an engine, and the
ground shrinks before his treading.
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