ense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as
the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and pity exercise the same
despotic control over it as those of love or beauty. It is as natural to
hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or
contempt, as our love or admiration.

"Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes."

Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and
scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a
bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of
deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to
grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm
our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to
contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of
passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our
conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or
dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of the
image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get
rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the thought."
This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the
sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's shew,--

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!"

when Collins makes Danger, with "limbs of giant mould,"

"Throw him on the steep
Of some loose hanging rock asleep:"

when Lear calls out in extreme anguish,

"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend.
How much more hideous shew'st in a child
Than the sea-monster!"

--the passion of contempt in the one case, of terror in the other, and of
indignation in the last, is perfectly satisfied. We see the thing
ourselves, and shew it to others as we feel it to exist, and as, in spite
of ourselves, we are compelled to think of it. The imagination, by thus
embodying and turning them to shape, gives an obvious relief to the
indistinct and importunate cravings of the will.--We do not wish the thing
to be so; but we wish it to appear such as it is. For knowledge is
conscious power; and the mind is no longer, in this case, the dupe, though
it may be the victim of vice or folly.

Poetry is in all