a,
agitated this way and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms; while in
the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish only the cries of despair or
the silence of death! Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative
part of passion--that which remains after the event, which the mind
reposes on when all is over, which looks upon circumstances from the
remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them from the world
of action to that of contemplation. The objects of dramatic poetry affect
us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us by
surprise, or force us upon action, "while rage with rage doth sympathise:"
the objects of epic poetry affect us through the medium of the
imagination, by magnitude and distance, by their permanence and
universality. The one fill us with terror and pity, the other with
admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike the
imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently of
any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the vicissitudes of
human life. For instance, we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a
Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certain emotion, a
sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind. The heavenly bodies
that hang over our heads wherever we go, and "in their untroubled element
shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all our cares forgotten," affect
us in the same way. Thus Satan's address to the Sun has an epic, not a
dramatic interest; for though the second person in the dialogue makes no
answer and feels no concern, yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon
him, like the eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what he says, like an
universal presence. Dramatic poetry and epic, in their perfection, indeed,
approximate to and strengthen one another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid
from the dignity of persons and things, as the heroic does from human
passion, but in theory they are distinct.--When Richard II. calls for the
looking-glass to contemplate his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that
affecting exclamation: "Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt
away before the sun of Bolingbroke," we have here the utmost force of
human passion, combined with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen
power. When Milton says of Satan:

"--His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess
Of glory