Essays Æsthetical by George H. (George Henry) Calvert
page 50 of 181 (27%)
page 50 of 181 (27%)
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Often the most suitable form of words is made of plainest, commonest parts of speech, and the fewest of them. The more intense and deep the feeling, the greater is the need of briefest, simplest utterance. When in one of those pauses of frantic wrath,--like the sudden rifts that momentarily let the calm stars through a whirling canopy of storm,--Lear utters imploringly that appeal to Heaven, the words are the familiar words of hourly use; but what divine tenderness and what sweep of power in three lines! "O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause; send down and take my part!" The thirty-third canto of the "Inferno" supremely exemplifies the sustaining energy of poetic imagination, that by its sublimating light it can forever hold before the mind, in tearful, irresistible beauty, one of the most woful forms of human suffering, death by starvation. In that terrific picture, in front of which all the generations of men that come after Dante are to weep purifying tears, the most exquisite stroke is given in five monosyllables; but in those five little words what depth of pathos, what concentration of meaning! On the fourth day one of Ugolino's dying sons throws himself at his father's feet, crying,-- "Father, why dost not help me?" Here let me remark that it is not by witnessing, through poetically imaginative representation, scenes of suffering and agony, |
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