Now, by the supposition, excitement is an
unusual and irregular state of the mind; ideas and feelings do not
in that state succeed each other in accustomed order. But if the
words by which this excitement is produced are in themselves powerful,
or the images and feelings have an undue proportion of pain connected
with them, there is some danger that the excitement may be carried
beyond its proper bounds. Now the co-presence of something regular,
something to which the mind has been accustomed when in an unexcited
or a less excited state, cannot but have great efficacy in tempering
and restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling.
This may be illustrated by appealing to the Reader's own experience
of the reluctance with which he comes to the re-perusal of the
distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe, or the Gamester. While
Shakespeare's writings, in the most pathetic scenes, never act upon
us as pathetic beyond the bounds of pleasure--an effect which is in
a great degree to be ascribed to small, but continual and regular
impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement.
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