Note 205 — INDEX TO THE NOTES.

What might this be? This is a direct question about a past event, and has the same meaning as “what should it be?” in line 482: see note there. A thousand fantasies, etc. On this, passage Lowell says: “That wonderful passage in Comus of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas’s abstract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet.” Reference may also be made to the Anat. of Mel.: “Fear makes our imagination conceive what it list, ... and tyrannizeth over our fantasy more than all other affections, especially in the dark”; also to the song prefixed to the same work, “My phantasie presents a thousand ugly shapes,” etc. On the power of imagination or phantasy, Shakespeare says: