he spring which keeps all the wheels in motion. If it worked
unhindered, the watch would run down in a few minutes. Beauty, holding
us in the spell of description and reflection, is like the barrel
which checks its movement.

Or we may say that interest is the body of a poetic work, and beauty
the soul. In the epic and the drama, interest, as a necessary quality
of the action, is the matter; and beauty, the form that requires the
matter in order to be visible.

PSYCHOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS.

In the moment when a great affliction overtakes us, we are hurt to
find that the world about us is unconcerned and goes its own way. As
Goethe says in _Tasso_, how easily it leaves us helpless and alone,
and continues its course like the sun and the moon and the other gods:

_... die Welt, wie sie so leicht,
Uns huelflos, einsam laesst, und ihren Weg,
Wie Sonn' und Mond und andre Goetter geht_.

Nay more! it is something intolerable that even we ourselves have
to go on with the mechanical round of our daily business, and that
thousands of our own actions are and must be unaffected by the pain
that throbs within us. And so, to restore the harmony between our
outward doings and our inward feelings, we storm and shout, and tear
our hair, and stamp with pain or rage.

Our temperament is so _despotic_ that we are not satisfied unless
we draw everything into our own life, and force all the world to
sympathise with us. The only way of achieving this would be to win the
love of others, so that the afflictions which oppress our own hearts
might oppress theirs as well. Since that is attended with some
difficulty, we often choose the shorter way, and blab out our burden
of woe to people who do not care, and listen with curiosity, but
without sympathy, and much oftener with satisfaction.

Speech and the communication of thought, which, in their mutual
relations, are always attended by a slight impulse on the part of the
will, are almost a physical necessity. Sometimes, however, the lower
animals entertain me much more than the average man. For, in the first
place, what can such a man say? It is only conceptions, that is, the
driest of ideas, that can be communicated by means of words; and what
sort of conceptions has the average man to communicate, if he does
not merely tell a story or give a report, neither of which makes
conversation? The greatest charm of conversation is the mimetic part
of it,--the character that is