“Look where he comes! not poppy, nor mandragora,
      Nor all the drowsy syrups of the East,
      Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
      Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”—­

And he enters at this moment, like the crested serpent, crowned with his wrongs and raging for revenge!  The whole depends upon the turn of a thought.  A word, a look, blows the spark of jealousy into a flame; and the explosion is immediate and terrible as a volcano.  The dialogues in Lear, in Macbeth, that between Brutus and Cassius, and nearly all those in Shakspeare, where the interest is wrought up to its highest pitch, afford examples of this dramatic fluctuation of passion.  The interest in Chaucer is quite different; it is like the course of a river, strong, and full, and increasing.  In Shakspeare, on the contrary, it is like the sea, agitated this way and that, and loud-lashed by furious storms; while in the still pauses of the blast, we distinguish only the cries of despair, or the silence of death!  Milton, on the other hand, takes the imaginative part of passion—­that which remains after the event, which the mind reposes on when all is over, which looks upon circumstances from the remotest elevation of thought and fancy, and abstracts them from the world of action to that of contemplation.  The objects of dramatic poetry affect us by sympathy, by their nearness to ourselves, as they take us by surprise, or force us upon action, “while rage with rage doth sympathise”; the objects of epic poetry affect us through the medium of the imagination, by magnitude and distance, by their permanence and universality.  The one fill us with terror and pity, the other with admiration and delight.  There are certain objects that strike the imagination, and inspire awe in the very idea of them, independently of any dramatic interest, that is, of any connection with the vicissitudes of human life.  For instance, we cannot think of the pyramids of Egypt, of a Gothic ruin, or an old Roman encampment, without a certain emotion, a sense of power and sublimity coming over the mind.  The heavenly bodies that hang over our heads wherever we go, and “in their untroubled element shall shine when we are laid in dust, and all our cares forgotten,” affect us in the same way.  Thus Satan’s address to the Sun has an epic, not a dramatic interest; for though the second person in the dialogue makes no answer and feels no concern, yet the eye of that vast luminary is upon him, like the eye of heaven, and seems conscious of what he says, like an universal presence.  Dramatic poetry and epic, in their perfection, indeed, approximate to and strengthen one another.  Dramatic poetry borrows aid from the dignity of persons and things, as the heroic does from human passion, but in theory they are distinct.—­When Richard II. calls for the looking-glass to contemplate his faded majesty in it, and bursts into that affecting exclamation:  “Oh, that I were a mockery-king of snow, to melt away before the sun of Bolingbroke,” we have here the utmost force of human passion, combined with the ideas of regal splendour and fallen power.  When Milton says of Satan: