arate may; but they have no
natural connexion.

Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives,
and in almost all good serious fictions there is true poetry. But
there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as
such, and the interest excited by poetry; for the one is derived from
incident, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the
source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states
of human sensibility; in the other, of a series of states of mere
outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected
more or less by representations of the latter kind, and all, or almost
all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest
correspond to two distinct, and (as respects their greatest
development) mutually exclusive, characters of mind.

At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story,
merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is
the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least
relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is
especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and not having been even in
the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what
stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued,
and the story-teller in greatest request and honour?--In a rude state
like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all
nations in the earliest ages. But in this state of society there is
little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, that is,
essentially stories, and derive their principal interest from the
incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most
elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the
simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate
pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live
wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice
or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the
contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and
from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this
most grown-up and unchildlike age--the minds and hearts of greatest
depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in
poetry; the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all
events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords,