from his all-obeying breath Johnson: ‘Doom’ is declared rather by an all-commanding, than an ‘all-obeying breath.’ I suppose we ought to read—‘allobeyed breath.’—Craik (Note on ‘a labouring day,’ Jul. Cæs. I, i, 4): An expression used by Cowper (in his verses composed in the name of Alexander Selkirk), ‘the sound of the church-going bell’ has been passionately reprobated by Wordsworth. ‘The epithet church-going applied to a bell,’ observes the critic (in an Appendix upon the subject of Poetic Diction), ‘and that by so chaste a writer as Cowper, is an instance of the strange abuses which poets have introduced into their language, till they and their readers take them as matters of course, if they do not single them out expressly as matters of admiration.’ A church-going bell is merely a bell for churchgoing; and the expression is constructed on the same principle with a thousand others that are and always have been in familiar use;—such as a marauding or a sight-seeing expedition, a banking or a house-building speculation, a fox-hunting country, a lending library, a fishing village, etc. What would Wordsworth have said to such a daring and extreme employment of the same form as we have in Shakespeare, where he makes Cleopatra say, speaking of the victorious Cæsar,—‘From his all-obeying breath I hear The doom of Egypt?’ But these audacities of language are of the very sould of poetry.
William Shakespeare. Horace Howard Furness. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra. Philadelphia and London. J. B. Lippincott Company. 1907.
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