against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it. In like manner, the 'So I am of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years. What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello, with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of departed happiness, when he exclaims, 'Oh, now, for ever, Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! That make ambition virtue! Oh, farewell! Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! How his passion lashes itself up and swells and rages like a tide in its sounding course, when, 1 Othello, iii. 3. in answer to the doubts expressed of his returning love, he says, 'Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Swallow them up.'1 The climax of his expostulation afterwards with Desdemona is at that passage," ... 'But there where I have garnered up my heart, . . One mode in which the dramatic exhibition of passion excites our sympathy without raising our disgust is, that in proportion as it sharpens the edge of calamity and disappointment, it strengthens the desire of good. It enhances our consciousness of the blessing, by making us sensible of the magnitude of the loss. The storm of passion lays bare and shows us the rich depths of the human soul; the whole of our existence, the sum-total of our passions and pursuits, of that which we desire and that which we 1 Othello, iii. 3. 2 By a slip of the pen the author wrote 'line.' See Othello,' iv. I (Dyce's edition, 1868, vii. 446). — ED. dread, is brought before us by contrast; the action and re-action are equal; the keenness of immediate suffering only gives us a more intense aspiration after, and a more intimate participation with, the antagonist world of good, makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life, tugs at the heart-strings, loosens the pressure about them, and calls the springs of thought and feeling into play with tenfold force. Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of our nature, as well as of the sensitive, of the desire to know, the will to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The domestic, or prose tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties, our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason, however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw off; the tragedy of Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections, abstracts evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination and with the deepest workings of the heart, and rouses the whole man within us. The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry is not anything peculiar to it as poetry as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not an anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street, the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not, then, the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose; nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and executions about the streets find it necessary to have them turned into penny ballads before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. We are as prone to make a torment of our fears as to luxuriate in our hopes of good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it. The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration. 'Masterless passion sways us to the mood Of what it likes or loathes.' Not that we like what we loathe, but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it; to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves; to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity; to embody it to the senses; to stigmatize it by name; to grapple with it in thought, in action; to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of anything, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect |