e of
the mind; ideas and feelings do not, in that state, succeed each other
in accustomed order. If the words, however, by which this excitement is
produced be in themselves powerful, or the images and feelings have an
undue proportion of pain connected with them, there is some danger that
the excitement may he carried beyond its proper bounds. Now the
co-presence of something regular, something to which the mind has been
accustomed in various moods and in a less excited state, cannot but have
great efficacy in tempering and restraining the passion by an
intertexture of ordinary feeling, and of feeling not strictly and
necessarily connected with the passion. This is unquestionably true; and
hence, though the opinion will at first appear paradoxical, from the
tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its
reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial
existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that
more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a
greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in
metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of
the old ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which
would illustrate this opinion; and I hope, if the following Poems be
attentively perused, similar instances will be found in them. This
opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader's own
experience of the reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of
the distressful parts of _Clarissa Harlowe_, or the _Gamester_; while
Shakspeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon us,
as pathetic, beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect which, in a much
greater degree than might at first be imagined, is to be ascribed to
small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from
the metrical arrangement.--On the other hand (what it must be allowed
will much more frequently happen) if the Poet's words should be
incommensurate with the passion, and inadequate to raise the Reader to a
height of desirable excitement, then, (unless the Poet's choice of his
metre has been grossly injudicious) in the feelings of pleasure which
the Reader has been accustomed to connect with metre in general, and in
the feeling, whether cheerful or melancholy, which he has been
accustomed to connect with that particular movement of metre, there will
be found something which