human action of to-day, even though
upon the representation of this last the most consummate skill may
have been expended, and though it has the advantage of appealing by
its modern language, familiar manners, and contemporary allusions, to
all our transient feelings and interests. These, however, have no
right to demand of a poetical work that it shall satisfy them; their
claims are to be directed elsewhere. Poetical works belong to the
domain of our permanent passions: let them interest these, and the
voice of all subordinate claims upon them is at once silenced.

Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido--what modern poem presents
personages as interesting, even to us moderns, as these personages of
an 'exhausted past'? We have the domestic epic dealing with the
details of modern life which pass daily under our eyes; we have poems
representing modern personages in contact with the problems of modern
life, moral, intellectual, and social; these works have been produced
by poets the most distinguished of their nation and time; yet I
fearlessly assert that _Hermann and Dorothea_, _Childe Harold_,
_Jocelyn_, _The Excursion_, leave the reader cold in comparison with
the effect produced upon him by the latter books of the Iliad, by the
_Orestea_, or by the episode of Dido. And why is this? Simply because
in the three latter cases the action is greater, the personages
nobler, the situations more intense: and this is the true basis of the
interest in a poetical work, and this alone.

It may be urged, however, that past actions may be interesting in
themselves, but that they are not to be adopted by the modern Poet,
because it is impossible for him to have them clearly present to his
own mind, and he cannot therefore feel them deeply, nor represent them
forcibly. But this is not necessarily the case. The externals of a
past action, indeed, he cannot know with the precision of a
contemporary; but his business is with its essentials. The outward man
of Oedipus or of Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the
ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself;
but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with
their inward man; with their feelings and behaviour in certain tragic
situations, which engage their passions as men; these have in them
nothing local and casual; they are as accessible to the modern Poet as
to a contemporary.

The date of an action, then, signifies nothing: the action it