Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/27

Rh with romantic passion and ideality. The drama, then, ever catholic and universal, is a standing criticism upon the war of schools,—a war usually foregone whenever the drama reaches and maintains a successful height. I have suggested heretofore the probability that dramatic feeling, and even the production of works in dramatic form, will distinguish the next poetic movement of our own language and haply of this Western world.

But criticism of style and method should be extended to specific productions, and to the writers of a certain period or literature. To the essays which in that wise have come from my own hand this treatise is a natural complement. If inconsistent with them,—if this statement of first principles could not be made up from my books of "applied criticism," I would doubt the integrity of the one and the other; for I have found, in preparing the marginal notes and topical index of the present volume, that nearly every phase and constituent of art has been touched upon, however briefly, which was illustrated in the analytic course of my former essays. E. C. S., August, 1892.