A lie with an oath not always slight, "and a jest with a sad brow," is a prophecy of America which Mr. Sumner might have incorporated among his other classic Voices.
The country also supplies specimens of a wild-cat oratory in whose bombast Shakspeare might have recognized an element of his own imagination. I am not certain whether the following is genuine, or possesses only the truth of verisimilitude: "Build a worm-fence around the winter's supply of summer weather; skim the clouds from the sky with a teaspoon; catch a thunder-cloud in a bladder; break a hurricane to harness; ground-sluice an earthquake; lasso an avalanche; pin a napkin on the crater of an active volcano; but, Mr. Chairman, never expect to see me false to my principles." On the whole, the stress laid upon the "principles" is quite in favor of its American genuineness.
The quality of imagination which creates the humorousness of an exaggeration can also be fine enough to stop it before a laugh is raised. In that case it may be charged with the subtlety of wit. But, if the poetic feeling predominates, the sense of wit is merged in that, and requires an after-thought to recall it; as when Shakspeare describes how the populace rushed to see Cleopatra coming up the river Cydnus, leaving Antony in the market-place: he
"Did sit alone, Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy, Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too, And made a gap in Nature."
"But for vacancy" is a phrase that piques suggestion. It may be that the air dreads leaving a vacuum if it goes to see her. It may be that Antony's whistling vaguely detains it. Or it may be that the air is in a mood so vacuous that it cannot entertain any preference for any thing, even for Cleopatra. And the possibility that the atmosphere could all leave and go elsewhere is an extravagance at once large and subtle. But, just as the smile impends, the ample poetry of the whole passage checks it.
A passage from "The English Traveller" of Thomas Heywood, published in 1633, is thoroughly American in its style of describing a drinking scene, and the shipwreck of the company by drink. The topers suddenly conceive that the room is a vessel laboring at sea: one climbs the bed-post and reports turbulent weather, whereat all go to work to lighten the vessel by throwing the furniture into the street. One man gets into the bass-viol for a cock-boat. When the constable enters he is taken for Neptune, and his posse for Tritons. In short, the American gift for exaggeration was started under an Elizabethan sun.