with actual suffering, be the object good or bad, is in its nature
painful; an obvious reason why so few in the more prosaic world have
the virtue to seek it.

But is it not the business of the artist to touch the heart?
True,--and it is his high privilege, as its liege-lord, to sound its
very depths; nay, from its lowest deep to touch alike its loftiest
breathing pinnacle. Yet he may not even approach it, except through
the transforming atmosphere of the imagination, where alone the
saddest notes of woe, even the appalling shriek of despair, are
softened, as it were, by the tempering dews of this visionary region,
ere they fall upon the heart. Else how could we stand the smothered
moan of Desdemona, or the fiendish adjuration of Lady Macbeth,--more
frightful even than the after-deed of her husband,--or look upon the
agony of the wretched Judas, in the terrible picture of Rembrandt,
when he returns the purchase of blood to the impenetrable Sanhedrim?
Ay, how could we ever stand these but for that ideal panoply through
which we feel only their modified vibrations?

Let the imitation, or rather copy, be so close as to trench on
deception, the effect will be far different; for, the _condition_
of _relation_ being thus virtually lost, the copy becomes as
the original,--circumscribed by its own qualities, repulsive or
attractive, as the case may be. I remember a striking instance of this
in a celebrated actress, whose copies of actual suffering were so
painfully accurate, that I was forced to turn away from the scene,
unable to endure it; her scream of agony in Belvidera seemed to ring
in my ears for hours after. Not so was it with the great Mrs. Siddons,
who moved not a step but in a poetic atmosphere, through which the
fiercest passions seemed rather to _loom_ like distant mountains