shall set out, and write down my
thoughts as they were developed in me.

"Laocoon suffers as Sophocles' Philoctetes." But how does the latter
suffer? It is curious that his sufferings should leave such a
different impression behind them. The cries, the shrieking, the wild
imprecations, with which he filled the camp, and interrupted all the
sacrifices and holy rites, resound no less horribly through his desert
island, and were the cause of his being banished to it. The same
sounds of despondency, sorrow, and despair fill the theater in the
poet's imitation. It has been observed that the third act of this
piece is shorter than the others; from this it may be gathered, say
the critics, that the ancients took little pains to preserve a
uniformity of length in the different acts. I quite agree with them,
but I should rather ground my opinion upon another example than this.
The sorrowful exclamations and the moanings, of which this act
consists, must have been pronounced with tensions and breakings off
altogether different from those required in a continuous speech, and
doubtless made this act last quite as long in the representation as
the others. It appears much shorter to the reader, when seen on paper,
than it must have done to the audience in a theater.

A cry is the natural expression of bodily pain. Homer's wounded heroes
frequently fall with cries to the ground. He makes Venus, when merely
scratched, shriek aloud; not that he may thereby paint the effeminacy
of the goddess of pleasure, but rather that he may give suffering
Nature her due; for even the iron Mars, when he feels the lance of
Diomedes, shrieks so horribly that his cries are like those of ten
thousand furious warriors, and fill both armies with horror, Tho
Homer, in other respects, raises his heroes above human nature, they
always remain faithful to it in matters connected with the feeling of
pain and insult, or its expression through cries, tears, or
reproaches. In their actions they are beings of a higher order, in
their feelings true men.

I know that we, more refined Europeans, of a wiser and later age, know
how to keep our mouths and eyes under closer restraint. We are
forbidden by courtesy and propriety to cry and weep; and with us the
active bravery of the first rough age of the world has been changed
into a passive. Yet even our own ancestors, tho barbarians, were
greater in the latter than in the former. To suppress all pain, to
meet the strok