erfectly. What, pray, is the aim of
all tragedy? The Stagyrite has told us--to purify the passions by pity
and terror. They ventilate and cleanse the soul--till its atmosphere is
like that of a calm, bright summer day. All plays, therefore, must be on
the Passions. And all that Joanna intended--and it was a great intention
greatly effected--was in her Series of Dramas to steady her purposes by
ever keeping one great end in view, of which the perpetual perception
could not fail to make all the means harmonious, and therefore majestic.
One passion was, therefore, constituted sovereign of the soul in each
glorious tragedy--sovereign sometimes by divine right--sometimes an
usurper--generally a tyrant. In De Monfort we behold the horrid reign of
Hate. But in his sister--the seraphic sway of Love. Darkness and light
sometimes opposed in sublime contrast--and sometimes the light
swallowing up the darkness--or "smoothing its raven down till it
smiles." Finally, all is black as night and the grave--for the light,
unextinguished, glides away into some far-off world of peace. Count
Basil! A woman only could have imagined that divine drama. How different
the love Basil feels for Victoria from Antony's for Cleopatra! Pure,
deep, high as the heaven and the sea. Yet on it we see him borne away to
shame, destruction, and death. It is indeed his ruling passion. But up
to the day he first saw her face his ruling passion had been the love of
glory. And the hour he died by his own hand was troubled into madness by
many passions; for are they not all mysteriously linked together,
sometimes a dreadful brotherhood?

Do you wonder how one mind can have such vivid consciousness of the
feelings of another, while their characters are cast in such different
moulds? It is, indeed, wonderful--but the power is that of sympathy and
genius. The dramatic poet, whose heart breathes love to all living
things, and whose overflowing tenderness diffuses itself over the beauty
even of unliving nature, may yet paint with his creative hand the
steeled heart of him who sits on a throne of blood--the lust of crime in
a mind polluted with wickedness--the remorse of acts which could never
pass in thought through his imagination as his own. For, in the act of
imagination he can suppress in his mind its own peculiar feelings--its
good and gracious affections--call up from their hidden places those
elements of our being, of which the seeds were sown in him as in
all--