the midst of yon
noisy children. But as their noise reaches me here, subdued and
mellowed; and knowing, thank Heaven! that the urchins are not within
reach of me, I could readily dream myself back into childhood and into
sympathy with the lost playfields of school.

"So surely it must be with grief: how different the terrible agony for a
beloved one just gone from earth, to the soft regret for one who
disappeared into heaven years ago! So with the art of poetry: how
imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must
remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate,
and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock
if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we
dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and
married his mother. But when Oedipus commits those unhappy mistakes
nobody is shocked. Oxford in the nineteenth century is a long way off
from Thebes three thousand or four thousand years ago.

"And," continued Kenelm, plunging deeper into the maze of metaphysical
criticism, "even where the poet deals with persons and things close upon
our daily sight--if he would give them poetic charm he must resort to a
sort of moral or psychological distance; the nearer they are to us in
external circumstance, the farther they must be in some internal
peculiarities. Werter and Clarissa Harlowe are described as
contemporaries of their artistic creation, and with the minutest details
of an apparent realism; yet they are at once removed from our daily
lives by their idiosyncrasies and their fates. We know that while Werter
and Clarissa are so near to us in much that we sympathize with them as
friends and kinsfolk, they are yet as much remote from us in the poetic
and idealized side of their natures as if they belonged to the age of
Homer; and this it is that invests with charm the very pain which their
fate inflicts on us. Thus, I suppose, it must be in love. If the love we
feel is to have the glamor of poetry, it must be love for some one
morally at a distance from our ordinary habitual selves; in short,
differing from us in attributes which, however near we draw to the
possessor, we can never approach, never blend, in attributes of our own;
so that there is something in the loved one that always remains an
ideal--a mystery--'a sun-bright summit mingling with the sky!'" ...

From this state, half comatose, half unconsci