principle in the mind as the love of pleasure. Objects of terror and
pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or
beauty. It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to
express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.

"Masterless passion sways us to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes."

Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred
and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every
refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a
bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of
deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to
grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm
our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to
contend with it to the utmost. Poetry is only the highest eloquence of
passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our
conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or
dignified, delightful or distressing. It is the perfect coincidence of
the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot
get rid in any other way, that gives an instant "satisfaction to the
thought." This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and
tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic. When Pope says of the Lord Mayor's
shew,--

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,
But lives in Settle's numbers one day more!"

--when Collins makes Danger, "with limbs of giant mould,"