Passion moves the poet to intensity, which is attained by selection of
those sensory images which are significant. Thus the treatise praises the
ode by Sappho which it quotes, because the poet has taken the emotions
incident to the frenzy of love from the attendant symptoms, from
actuality, and first selected and then closely combined those which were
conspicuous and intense.[30] This intensity which is characteristic of the
poet he contrasts with the amplification of the orators, which strengthens
the fabric of an argument by insistence and is especially "appropriate in
perorations and digressions, and in all passages written for the style and
for display, in writings of historical and scientific nature." Yet
Demosthenes when moved by passion attains the sublimity of intensity and
strikes like lightning.[31] Both in oratory and in poetry sublimity is
attained by image-making, as when "moved by enthusiasm and passion, you
seem to see the things of which you speak, and place them under the eyes
of your hearers."[32] It would be difficult to phrase better the
conditions of imaginative realization. But the author felt truly that
this realization was different in poetry from what it was in rhetoric. In
commenting on a quotation from the _Orestes_, of Euripides, he says:

There the poet saw the Furies with his own eyes, and what his
imagination presented he almost compelled his hearers to behold.

And after an imaginative passage from the lost _Phaethon_, of the same
author, he says:

Would you not say that the soul of the writer treads the car with the
driver, and shares the peril, and wears wings as the horses do?

From this the rhetorical imagination differs in that it is at its best
when it has fact for its object.[33] Longinus would seem to say that the