Conclamat Nisus: nec se celare tenebris
Amplius, aut tantum potuit perferre dolorem:
“Me, me, adsum qui feci, in me convertite ferrum,
O Rutuli! mea fraus omnis; nihil iste nec ausus,
Nec potuit; cœlum hoc et conscia sidera testor.”
Tantum infelicem nimium dilexit amicum.
Talia dicta dabat; sed viribus ensis adactus
Transabiit costas.’
“However conspicuous such a passage may be in an ancient poet, it would not, we believe, be regarded with great admiration in a modern.
“In one of Miss Edgeworth’s little stories for children, which are far better worth reading than most books for grown people, she says of the cottage of some poor woman that it was as clean as misery could make it. There is a pathos in these few words, not unusual in her writings, but such as we can find in but a scanty number of writers before our own age. It has not been well understood, that the indirect expressions of suffering are far more powerful than the direct, and that we are much more affected by suppressed, than by unrestrained emotion. In but little of the poetry of past times is there any trace of quickness or delicacy of perception in regard to the modes or expressions of human feeling and passion; for man himself had not become sufficiently refined for the exercise of such observation. Plato objects to Homer, and the tragic poets of Greece, that they degraded men’s minds by representing their heroes, when suffering, as pouring forth long lamentations, singing their sorrows, and beating their breasts. So far as they did so, there was nothing pathetic in their writings. Who, indeed, in modern times, was ever able to imagine himself affected by the sorrows of Achilles for the death of Patroclus, or those of his mother, Thetis, in consequence?