antithesis of feelings and thoughts! How natural! we say;--but
the very wonder that caused the exclamation, implies that we perceived art
at the same moment. We catch the hint from nature itself. Whenever in
mountains or cataracts we discover a likeness to any thing artificial
which yet we know is not artificial--what pleasure! And so it is in
appearances known to be artificial, which appear to be natural. This
applies in due degrees, regulated by steady good sense, from a clump of
trees to the _Paradise Lost_ or _Othello_. It would be easy to apply it to
painting and even, though with greater abstraction of thought, and by more
subtle yet equally just analogies--to music. But this belongs to others;
suffice it that one great principle is common to all the fine arts, a
principle which probably is the condition of all consciousness, without
which we should feel and imagine only by discontinuous moments, and be
plants or brute animals instead of men;--I mean that ever-varying balance,
or balancing, of images, notions, or feelings, conceived as in opposition
to each other;--in short, the perception of identity and contrariety; the
least degree of which constitutes likeness, the greatest absolute
difference; but the infinite gradations between these two form all the
play and all the interest of our intellectual and moral being, till it
leads us to a feeling and an object more awful than it seems to me
compatible with even the present subject to utter aloud, though I am most
desirous to suggest it. For there alone are all things at once different
and the same; there alone, as the principle of all things, does
distinction exist unaided by division; there are will and reason,
succession of time and unmoving eternity, infinite change and ineffable
rest!--

"Return Alpheus! the dread voice is past
Which shrunk thy streams!"

----"Thou honour'd flood,
Smooth-_flowing_ Avon, crown'd with vocal reeds,
That strain I heard, was of a higher mood!--
But now my _voice_ proceeds."

We may divide a dramatic poet's characteristics before we enter into the
component merits of any one work, and with reference only to those things
which are to be the materials of all, into language, passion, and
character; always bearing in mind that these must act and react on each
other,--the language inspired by the passion, and the language and the
passion modified and differenced by the character. To the production of
the highest excellencies in