Everyone remembers that dizzying passage in King Lear when Edgar recounts to his father the effects of leaning over a non-existent cliff. What we recall is the stupendous clarity of the visualization, heralded by that line which ‘haunted’ Keats, ‘Hark, do you hear the sea?’ Edgar speaks of the fear of falling but, as commentators since Johnson have noticed, ‘diffuses his attention to distinct objects’:

John Bayley picks up Johnson's comment, ‘the crows impede your fall’, and argues that what the imagination is doing here is not plummeting to a depth but soaring into a different universe in its exhilarating observation of particulars, so characteristic of the liberating force of Shakespeare's poetry: crows, choughs, samphire-gatherer, the mice-like fishers and ‘diminished’ bark are points marking a free flight rather than free fall. Should the lines have been ‘all precipice, – all vacuum’ as Johnson believed? His own critical deprecation was full of zestful substantives: