mpyrean
poetry, may despise the circumscriptions of terrestrial nature. There is
no reason why a mind thus wandering in ecstacy should count the clock,
or why an hour should not be a century in that calenture of the brains
that can make the stage a field.

The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know,
from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that
the players are only players. They come to hear a certain number of
lines recited with just gesture and elegant modulation. The lines relate
to some action, and an action must be in some place; but the different
actions that complete a story may be in places very remote from each
other; and where is the absurdity of allowing that space to represent
first Athens, and then Sicily, which was always known to be neither
Sicily nor Athens, but a modern theatre?

By supposition, as place is introduced, time may be extended; the time
required by the fable elapses, for the most part, between the acts; for,
of so much of the action as is represented, the real and poetical
duration is the same. If, in the first act, preparations for war against
Mithridates are represented to be made in Rome, the event of the war
may, without absurdity, be represented, in the catastrophe, as happening
in Pontus; we know that there is neither war, nor preparation for war;
we know that we are neither in Rome nor Pontus; that neither Mithridates
nor Lucullus are before us. The drama exhibits successive imitations of
successive actions; and why may not the second imitation represent an
action that happened years after the first, if it be so connected with
it, that nothing but time can be supposed to intervene? Time is, of all
modes of existence, most obsequious to the imagination; a lapse of years
is as easily conceived as a passage of hours. In contemplation we easily
contract the time of real actions, and, therefore, willingly permit it
to be contracted when we only see their imitation.

It will be asked, how the drama moves, if it is not credited. It is
credited with all the credit due to a drama. It is credited, whenever it
moves, as a just picture of a real original; as representing to the
auditor what he would himself feel, if he were to do or suffer what is
there feigned to be suffered or to be done. The reflection that strikes
the heart is not, that the evils before us are real evils, but that they
are evils to which we ourselves may be exposed. If