Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/22

xii antique," just as there are stately examples of objective creation in the poetry of Christendom. Therefore it was not possible to confine a third lecture entirely to the one, nor a fourth entirely to the other. The creative element, however, is the main topic of the third, while the fourth, entitled "Melancholia," pursues chiefly the stream of self-expression. Together, the two afford all the scope permitted in this scheme for a swift glance at the world's masterpieces. The way now becomes clear for examination of the pure attributes which qualify the art we are considering:—on the side of aesthetics, beauty,—and therewith truth, as concerns the realistic, the instructive, the ethical; then the inventive and illuminating imagination, and passion with its motive power and sacred rage; lastly, the faculty divine, operative through insight, genius, inspiration, and consecrated by the minstrel's faith in law and his sense of a charge laid upon him. A concession from the original scheme appears in the briefness of the section devoted to passion, under which title a poet's emotion should receive the same attention elsewhere given to his taste, sincerity, and imaginative power. My limits compelled me to speak of passion at the opening of the final lecture, where it does not precisely belong, though a necessary excitant of "the faculty divine."