Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton
(to confine ourselves to modern writers) are philosophers of the very
loftiest power.
A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth. There
is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a
catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time,
place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of
actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing
in the mind of the Creator, which is itself the image of all other
minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of
time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur;
the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a
relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible
varieties of human nature. Time, which destroys the beauty and the use
of the story of particular facts, stripped of the poetry which should
invest them, augments that of poetry, and for ever develops new and
wonderful applications of the eternal truth which it contains.
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