of personal beauty, a more lustrous effect to the imagination than the purest gold.  We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower:  not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect, or the usual size of things of the same class, produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude and ponderous strength than another object of ten times the same dimensions.  The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects.  Things are equal to the imagination, which have the power of affecting the mind with an equal degree of terror, admiration, delight, or love.  When Lear calls upon the heavens to avenge his cause, “for they are old like him,” there is nothing extravagant or impious in this sublime identification of his age with theirs; for there is no other image which could do justice to the agonising sense of his wrongs and his despair!

Poetry is the high-wrought enthusiasm of fancy and feeling.  As in describing natural objects, it impregnates sensible impressions with the forms of fancy, so it describes the feelings of pleasure or pain, by blending them with the strongest movements of passion, and the most striking forms of nature.  Tragic poetry, which is the most impassioned species of it, strives to carry on the feeling to the utmost point of sublimity or pathos, by all the force of comparison or contrast; loses the sense of present suffering in the imaginary exaggeration of it; exhausts the terror or pity by an unlimited indulgence of it; grapples with impossibilities in its desperate impatience of restraint; throws us back upon the past, forward into the future; brings every moment of our being or object of nature in startling review before us; and in the rapid whirl of events, lifts us from the depths of woe to the highest contemplations on human life.  When Lear says of Edgar, “Nothing but his unkind daughters could have brought him to this;” what a bewildered amazement, what a wrench of the imagination, that cannot be brought to conceive of any other cause of misery than that which has bowed it down, and absorbs all other sorrow in its own!  His sorrow, like a flood, supplies the sources of all other sorrow.  Again, when he exclaims in the mad scene, “The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!” it is passion lending occasion to imagination to make every creature in league against him, conjuring up ingratitude and insult in their least looked-for and most galling shapes, searching every thread and fibre of his heart, and finding out the last remaining image of respect or attachment in the bottom of his breast, only to torture and kill it!  In like manner, the “So I am” of Cordelia gushes from her heart like a torrent of tears, relieving it of a weight of love and of supposed ingratitude, which had pressed upon it for years.  What a fine return of the passion upon itself is that in Othello—­with what a mingled agony of regret and despair he clings to the last traces of departed happiness—­when he exclaims,