With him artistic personification reached a pitch never attained before. We can trace the steps by which Greece passed from mythical to purely poetic personification, increasing in individuality in the Hellenic period; but Shakespeare opened up an entirely new region by dint of that flashlight genius of imagination which combined and illuminated all and everything.
The personification is plastic when Æschylus calls the heights the neighbours of the stars; individual, when Shakespeare speaks of hills that kiss the sky. It is plastic that fire and sea are foes who conspire together and keep faith to destroy the Argive army; it is individual to call sea and wind old wranglers who enter into a momentary armistice. Other personifications of Shakespeare's, as when he speaks of the 'wanton wind,' calls laughter a fool, and describes time as having a wallet on his back wherein he puts alms for oblivion, are of a kind which did not, and could not, exist in antiquity.
The richer a man's mental endowment, the more individual his feelings, the more he can see in Nature.
Shakespeare's fancy revelled in a wealth of images; new metaphors, new points of resemblance between the inner and outer worlds, were for ever pouring from his inexhaustible imagination.
The motive of amorous passion, for instance, was a very divining-rod in his hands, revealing the most delicate relations between Nature and the soul. Ibykos had pointed the contrast between the gay spring time and his own unhappy heart in which Eros raged like 'the Thracian blast.' Theocritus had painted the pretty shepherdess drawing all Nature under the spell of her charms; Akontios (Kallimachos) had declared that if trees felt the pangs and longings of love, they would lose their leaves; all such ideas, modern in their way, had been expressed in antiquity.
How like a winter hath my absence been From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! What old December's bareness everywhere! And yet this time removed was summer time, The teeming autumn, big with rich increase ... For summer and his pleasures wait on thee. And thou away the very birds are mute, Or, if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near, (Sonnet 97.)