l beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than
the purest gold. We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower: not that
he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond
what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same
class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous
strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions. The
intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects.
Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the
mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love. When
Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, "for they are old like
him," there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime
identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which
could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the
sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts
the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with
impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back
upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being
or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl
of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations
on human life. When Lear says, of Edgar, "Nothing but his unkind daughters
could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered amazement, what a
wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other
cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other
sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all
other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, "The little dogs
and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!" it is
passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league
against him, conjuring up ingratitude and i