soms of mankind. The poet must
reopen the palaces--he must place courts of justice beneath the canopy of
heaven--restore the gods, reproduce every extreme which the artificial
frame of actual life has abolished--throw aside every factitious
influence on the mind or condition of man which impedes the manifestation
of his inward nature and primitive character, as the statuary rejects
modern costume:--and of all external circumstances adopts nothing but
what is palpable in the highest of forms--that of humanity.

But precisely as the painter throws around his figures draperies of ample
volume, to fill up the space of his picture richly and gracefully, to
arrange its several parts in harmonious masses, to give due play to
color, which charms and refreshes the eye--and at once to envelop human
forms in a spiritual veil, and make them visible--so the tragic poet
inlays and entwines his rigidly contracted plot and the strong outlines
of his characters with a tissue of lyrical magnificence, in which, as in
flowing robes of purple, they move freely and nobly, with a sustained
dignity and exalted repose.

In a higher organization, the material, or the elementary, need not be
visible; the chemical color vanishes in the finer tints of the
imaginative one. The material, however, has its peculiar effect, and may
be included in an artistical composition. But it must deserve its place
by animation, fulness and harmony, and give value to the ideal forms
which it surrounds instead of stifling them by its weight.

In respect of the pictorial art, this is obvious to ordinary
apprehension, yet in poetry likewise, and in the tragical kind, which is
our immediate subject, the same doctrine holds good. Whatever fascinates
the senses alone is mere matter, and the rude element of a work of art:--
if it takes the lead it will inevitably destroy the poetical--which lies
at the exact medium between the ideal and the sensible. But man is so
constituted that he is ever impatient to pass from what is fanciful to
what is common; and reflection must, therefore, have its place even in
tragedy. But to merit this place it must, by means of delivery, recover
what it wants in actual life; for if the two elements of poetry, the
ideal and the sensible, do not operate with an inward mutuality, they
must at least act as allies--or poetry is out of the question. If the
balance be not intrinsically perfect, the equipoise can only be
maintained by an agitation of