The pleasure, however, derived from tragic poetry, is not any thing peculiar to it as poetry, as a fictitious and fanciful thing.  It is not an anomaly of the imagination.  It has its source and ground-work in the common love of strong excitement.  As Mr. Burke observes, people flock to see a tragedy; but if there were a public execution in the next street, the theatre would very soon be empty.  It is not then the difference between fiction and reality that solves the difficulty.  Children are satisfied with the stories of ghosts and witches in plain prose:  nor do the hawkers of full, true, and particular accounts of murders and executions about the streets, find it necessary to have them turned into penny ballads, before they can dispose of these interesting and authentic documents.  The grave politician drives a thriving trade of abuse and calumnies poured out against those whom he makes his enemies for no other end than that he may live by them.  The popular preacher makes less frequent mention of heaven than of hell.  Oaths and nicknames are only a more vulgar sort of poetry or rhetoric.  We are as fond of indulging our violent passions as of reading a description of those of others.  We are as prone to make a torment of our fears, as to luxuriate in our hopes of good.  If it be asked, Why we do so? the best answer will be, Because we cannot help it.  The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure.  Objects of terror and pity exercise the same despotic control over it as those of love or beauty.  It is as natural to hate as to love, to despise as to admire, to express our hatred or contempt, as our love or admiration.

      “Masterless passion sways us to the mood
      Of what it likes or loathes.”

Not that we like what we loathe; but we like to indulge our hatred and scorn of it; to dwell upon it, to exasperate our idea of it by every refinement of ingenuity and extravagance of illustration; to make it a bugbear to ourselves, to point it out to others in all the splendour of deformity, to embody it to the senses, to stigmatise it by name, to grapple with it in thought, in action, to sharpen our intellect, to arm our will against it, to know the worst we have to contend with, and to contend with it to the utmost.  Poetry is only the highest eloquence of passion, the most vivid form of expression that can be given to our conception of any thing, whether pleasurable or painful, mean or dignified, delightful or distressing.  It is the perfect coincidence of the image and the words with the feeling we have, and of which we cannot get rid in any other way, that gives an instant “satisfaction to the thought.”  This is equally the origin of wit and fancy, of comedy and tragedy, of the sublime and pathetic.  When Pope says of the Lord Mayor’s shew,—­

“Now night descending, the proud scene is o’er,
But lives in Settle’s numbers one day more!”

—­when Collins makes Danger, “with limbs of giant mould,”