Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/301

Rh of Priam and Achilles, of Hector and Andromache and Helen, has made them imperishable. The heroic epics have gone with their ages, and for every romantic and narrative poem we have a hundred novels; but the drama remains, with its range for the display of passion's extreme types. The keen satisfaction we take in an exhibition, See page 103. not of the joy and triumph alone, but of the tragedy, the crime, the failure of lives that ape our own, is not morbid, but elevating. We know by instinct that they are right who declare all passion good per se; we feel that it is a good servant if a bad master, and bad only when it goes awry, and that the exhibition of its force both enhances and instructs the force within each soul of us. Again, the poet who broods on human passion Exaltation. and its consequent action attains his highest creative power: he rises, as we say, at each outbreak and crisis, and the actor impersonating his conception must rise accordingly, or disappoint the audience which knows that such culminations are his opportunities, above the realistic level of a well-conceived play. More than all, and as I have suggested in a former lecture, the soul looks tranquilly Intense sensations enhance the worth of life. on, knowing that it, no more than its prototypes, can be harmed by any mischance. "Agonies" are merely "its changes of garments." They are forms of experience. The soul desires all experiences; to touch this planetary life at all points, to drink not of triumph and delight