The Star chamber - by B. Disraeli? Author:Benjamin Disraeli Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Anne Boleyn; a Dramatic Poem, by the Rev. H. H. Milman, Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. London: John Murray. 1826. pp. 168. The language of n... more »arrative and of dramatic poetry is no less essentially distinct, than the object which each of them is intended to promote. A story of eventful life, with its successive diversities of action, locality and circumstance,—an expanse of natural scenery, with its gradual transitions of light and shadow, smooth and rugged, must kindle the imagination by a separate yet blended detail of every important feature in the group. The tone of diction must be brilliant in proportion, every artifice of trope and metaphor must be called in aid, every elegance of expression which can allure and captivate the senses. Our fancy must be treated as a child, it must be fed on delicacies, and amused with toys. But the language of dramatic poetry is directed to the heart, tLat fretful and capricious tyrant, who is only irritated by indulgence, and should never be accosted but with boldness and resolution. His movements indeed are not unconnected with the imagination, but the sway of the latter over our affections is but seldom practised, and not without peril even when most earnestly and most cautiously exerted. The momentary mood must be studied, interests must be balanced, and opportunities watched; for the feelings of human nature will not readily be tampered with, and it were as reasonable to expect that a tyger might be tamed by the sight of a picture or a bauble, as that the heart of man might be won over by a mere display of fanciful colours and combinations. The poems of Mr. Milman are, generally, in their structure dramatic; in their language invariably narrative. That is to say, his dialogue is either purely descriptive after the ...« less