with human distress or passion concurrently with human sympathies, and
as supporting that blended sympathy by a symbol incarnated with the
fixed agencies of nature. For instance, a pair of youthful lovers
perish by a double suicide originating in a fatal mistake, and a
mistake operating in each case through a noble self-oblivion. The tree
under which their meeting has been concerted, and which witnesses their
tragedy, is supposed ever afterwards to express the divine sympathy
with this catastrophe in the gloomy color of its fruit:--

'At tu, quae ramis (arbor!) miserabile corpus
Nunc tegis unius, mox es tectura duorum,
Signa tene caedis:--pullosque et luctibus aptos
Semper habe fructus--gemini monumenta cruoris:'

Such is the dying adjuration of the lady to the tree. And the fruit
becomes from that time a monument of a double sympathy--sympathy from
man, sympathy from a dark power standing behind the agencies of nature,
and speaking through them. Meantime the object of this sympathy is
understood to be not the individual catastrophe, but the universal case
of unfortunate love exemplified in this particular romance. The
inimitable grace with which Ovid has delivered these early traditions
of human tenderness, blending with human superstition, is notorious;
the artfulness of the pervading connection, by which every tale in the
long succession is made to arise spontaneously out of that which
precedes, is absolutely unrivalled; and this it was, with his luxuriant
gayety, which procured for him a preference, even with Milton, a poet
so opposite by intellectual constitution. It is but reasonable,
therefore, that this function of the miraculous should bear the name of
_Ovidian_. Pagan it was in its birth; and to paganism its titles
ultimately ascend. Yet we know that in the transitional state through