Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/290

260 I have laid stress, heretofore, upon the passion '''Passion. See pages 19, 49.''' which so vivifies all true poetry that certain thinkers believe the art has no other office than to give emotion vent. And I have just said that, while poetry which is not imaginative cannot be great, the utterance which lacks passion is seldom imaginative. It may tranquillize, but it seldom exalts and thrills. Therefore, what is this quality which we recognize as passion in imaginative literature? What does Milton signify, in his masterly tractate on education, by the element of poetry which, as we have seen, he mentions last, as if to emphasize it? Poetry, he says, is simple,—and so is all art at its best; it is sensuous,—and thus related to our mortal perceptions; lastly, it is passionate,—and this, I think, it must be to be genuine.

In popular usage the word "passion" is almost a Not an epithet of love alone. synonym for love, and we hear of "poets of passion," votaries of Eros or Anteros, as the case may be. Love has a fair claim to its title of the master passion, despite the arguments made in behalf of friendship and ambition respectively, and whether supremacy over human conduct, or its service to the artistic imagination, be the less. Almost every narrative-poem, novel, or drama, whatsoever other threads its coil may carry, seems to have love for a central strand. Love has the heart of youth in it,