dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves,
as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, "while rage with
rage doth sympathise"; the objects of epic poetry affect us through the
medium of the imagination, by magnitude and distance, by their
permanence and universality. The one fill us with terror and pity, the
other with admiration and delight. There are certain objects that strike
the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently
of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the
vicissitudes of human life. For instance, we cannot think of the
pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without
a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind.
The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and "in
their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all
our cares forgotten," affect us in the same way. Thus Satan's address to
the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest; for though the second
person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye
of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems
conscious of what he says, like an universal presence. Dramatic poetry
and epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximate to and strengthen one
another. Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and
things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are
distinct.--When Richard II. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate
his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation:
"Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of
Bolingbroke," we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined
with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power. When Milton says of
Satan:

"------His form had not yet lost
All her original brightness, nor appear'd