disproportion of the objects. Things are equal to the imagination, which
have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror,
admiration, delight, or love. When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge
his cause, "for they are old like him," there is nothing extravagant or
impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there
is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his
wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling. As in
describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the
forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by
blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most
striking forms of nature. Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned
species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of
sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses
the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it;
exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples
with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us
back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our
being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the
rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest
contemplations on human life. When Lear says of Edgar, "Nothing but his
unkind daughters could have brought him to this;" what a bewildered
amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to
conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down,
and absorbs all other sorrow in its own! His sorrow, like a flood,
supplies the sources of all other sorrow. Again, when he exclaims in the
mad scene, "The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see,
they bark at me!" it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make
every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and