Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/304

274 inevitable as that of a poet's outburst under stress Absolute dramatic passion. of personal emotion. You are conscious, for example, that one must endure a loss as irreparable as that which Cowper bemoaned, before he can realize the pathos and beauty of the monody "On the Receipt of my Mother's Picture":—

But you also feel, and as strongly, that only one who has been agonized by the final surrender, whether to violence or death, of an adored child, can fully comprehend that passionate wail of Constance bereft of Arthur:—

Shakespeare's dramas hold the stage, and if his stronger characters are not impersonated so frequently as of old, they are still the chief rôles of great actors, and are supported with a fitness of detail unattained before. The grand drama, then, is the most efficient form of poetry in an unideal period to conserve a taste for something imaginative and Modern equanimity. impassioned. But, with a public bred to reserve, our new plays and poems on the whole avoid extremes of feeling, which, alike in life