Whether Poetry is again to revive among us, or whether the power is
to be wholly stifled by our accurate notions about the laws and
conditions under which it is to be exercised, is a question upon
which there is room for great differences of opinion. Judging from
the past, I should suppose that till Poetry becomes less self-
conscious, less self-concentrated, more _dramatical_ in spirit, if
not in form, it will not have the qualities which can powerfully
affect Englishmen. Not only were the Poets of our most national age
dramatists, but there seems an evident dramatical tendency in those
who wrote what we are wont to call narrative, or epic, poems. Take
away the dramatic faculty from Chaucer, and the Canterbury Tales
become indeed, what they have been most untruly called, mere
versions of French or Italian Fables. Milton may have been right in
changing the form of the Paradise Lost,--we are bound to believe
that he was right; for what appeal can there be against his genius?
But he could not destroy the essentially dramatic character of a
work which sets forth the battle between good and evil, and the Will
of Man at once the Theatre and the Prize of the conflict. Is it not
true, that there is in the very substance of the English mind, that
which naturally predisposes us to sympathy with the Drama, and this
though we are perhaps the most untheatrical of all people? The love
of action, the impatience of abstraction, the equity which leads us
to desire that every one may have a fair hearing, the reserve which
had rather detect personal experience than have it announced--
tendencies all easily perverted to evil, often leading to results
the most contradictory, yet capable of the noblest cultivation--seem
to explain the fact, that writers of this kind should have
flourished so greatly among us, and that scarcely any others should
permanently interest us.