done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the
description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual
life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry
is painful also.

To this class of situations, poetically faulty as it appears to me, that
of Empedocles, as I have endeavored to represent him, belongs; and I
have therefore excluded the poem from the present collection.

And why, it may be asked, have I entered into this explanation
respecting a matter so unimportant as the admission or exclusion of the
poem in question? I have done so, because I was anxious to avow that the
sole reason for its exclusion was that which has been stated above; and
that it has not been excluded in deference to the opinion which many
critics of the present day appear to entertain against subjects chosen
from distant times and countries: against the choice, in short, of any
subjects but modern ones.

"The poet," it is said,[6] and by an intelligent critic, "the poet who
would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and
draw his subjects from matters of present import, and _therefore_ both
of interest and novelty."

Now this view I believe to be completely false. It is worth examining,
inasmuch as it is a fair sample of a class of critical dicta everywhere
current at the present day, having a philosophical form and air, but no
real basis in fact; and which are calculated to vitiate the judgment of
readers of poetry, while they exert, so far as they are adopted, a
misleading influence on the practice of those who make it.