Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
Even then, no doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet. Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personæ, a couple of small brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green 'plant-lice, or 'blight, or aphides.
They owe their very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal proscenium; their dramatis personæ, however familiar nominally, and however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves.
Mistakes of the kind have been made by others writers of fiction who have worked quickly. In the Comedy, the number of dramatis personae is exceedingly large. Balzac laughingly remarked one day that they needed a biographical dictionary to render their identity clear; and he added that perhaps somebody would be tempted to do the work at a later date. He guessed rightly. In 1893, Messrs.
Gerard caught Margaret, but was carried down by her weight and impetus; and, behold, the soil was strewed with dramatis personae. The docile mule was up again directly, and stood trembling. Martin was next, and looking round saw there was but one in pursuit; on this he made the young lovers fly on foot, while he checked the enemy as I have recorded.
Poets of such very different types as Dryden and Tennyson have produced work equal to their best, if not actually their best, at that age and later. Mr Browning had, a few years before, produced what are perhaps his actually greatest volumes, Men and Women and Dramatis Personae, the one at forty-three, the other at fifty-two.
But the reading of "Lorna Doone" calls to my mind, and very vividly, an original artistic principle of which English romance writers are either strangely ignorant or neglectful, viz., that the sublimation of the dramatis personae and the deeds in which they are involved must correspond, and their relationship should remain unimpaired.
When I first read through these, I was somewhat surprised at the omission of all reference to books which I know marked most striking periods in Narcissus' spiritual life: Sartor Resartus, Thoreau's Walden, for example, Mr. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, and Browning's Dramatis Personae.
For the rest, Imogine, who now and then talks deliriously, but who is always light-headed as far as her gown and hair can make her so, wanders about in dark woods with cavern-rocks and precipices in the back-scene; and a number of mute dramatis personae move in and out continually, for whose presence, there is always at least this reason, that they afford something to be seen, by that very large part of a Drury Lane audience who have small chance of hearing a word.
Now to introduce our dramatis personæ, with their "cast," for better effect rather unreasonably presumed. Galba, the chief mover in the catastrophe, as also the opener of its causes, an intriguing and fierce, but well-intentioned patriot, who ultimately becomes the next emperor. With Curtius a tribune, senators, conspirators, soldiers, priests, flamens, &c.
No poem in the volume of Dramatis Personae is connected with pictorial art, unless it be the few lines entitled A Face, lines of which Emily Patmore, the poet's wife, was the subject, and written, as Browning seldom wrote, for the mere record of beauty.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking