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.
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