n with the antagonist
world of good; makes us drink deeper of the cup of human life; tugs at the
heart-strings; loosens the pressure about them; and calls the springs of
thought and feeling into play with tenfold force.

Impassioned poetry is an emanation of the moral and intellectual part of
our nature, as well as of the sensitive--of the desire to know, the will
to act, and the power to feel; and ought to appeal to these different
parts of our constitution, in order to be perfect. The domestic or prose
tragedy, which is thought to be the most natural, is in this sense the
least so, because it appeals almost exclusively to one of these faculties,
our sensibility. The tragedies of Moore and Lillo, for this reason,
however affecting at the time, oppress and lie like a dead weight upon the
mind, a load of misery which it is unable to throw off: the tragedy of
Shakspeare, which is true poetry, stirs our inmost affections; abstracts
evil from itself by combining it with all the forms of imagination, and
with the deepest workings of the heart, and rouses the whole man within
us.

The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not anything
peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing. It is not an
anomaly of the imagination. It has its source and ground-work in the
common love of strong excitement. As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to
see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street,
the theatre would very soon be empty. It is not then the difference
between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty. Children are
satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose: nor do
the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and
executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into
penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic
documents. The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and
calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other
end than that he may live by them. The popular preacher makes less
frequent mention of heaven than of hell. Oaths and nicknames are only a
more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric. We are as fond of indulging our
violent passions as of reading a description of those of others. We are as
prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of
good. If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we
cannot help it. The s