Theseus in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream, V.i.4-22
Lovers
and madmen have such seething brains,
Such
shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More
than cool reason ever comprehends.
The
lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are
of imagination all compact:
One
sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That
is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees
Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The
poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth
glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And
as imagination bodies forth
The
forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns
them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A
local habitation and a name.
Such
tricks hath strong imagination.